Income Redistribution Predicts Greater Life Satisfaction Across Individual, National, and Cultural Characteristics. Felix Cheung. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28771021
Abstract: The widening income gap between the rich and the poor has important social implications. Governmental-level income redistribution through tax and welfare policies presents an opportunity to reduce income inequality and its negative consequences. The current longitudinal studies examined whether within-region changes in income redistribution over time relate to life satisfaction. Moreover, I examined potential moderators of this relationship to test the strong versus weak hypotheses of income redistribution. The strong hypothesis posits that income redistribution is beneficial to most. The weak hypothesis posits that income redistribution is beneficial to some and damaging to others. Using a nationally representative sample of 57,932 German respondents from 16 German states across 30 years (Study 1) and a sample of 112,876 respondents from 33 countries across 24 years (Study 2), I found that within-state and within-nation changes in income redistribution over time were associated with life satisfaction. The models predicted that a 10% reduction in Gini through income redistribution in Germany increased life satisfaction to the same extent as an 37% increase in annual income (Study 1), and a 5% reduction in Gini through income redistribution increased life satisfaction to the same extent as a 11% increase in GDP (Study 2). These associations were positive across individual, national, and cultural characteristics. Increases in income redistribution predicted greater satisfaction for tax-payers and welfare-receivers, for liberals and conservatives, and for the poor and the rich. These findings support the strong hypothesis of income redistribution and suggest that redistribution policies may play an important role in societal well-being.
[La hipótesis fuerte de redistribución plantea que la redistribución del ingreso es beneficiosa para la mayoría. La hipótesis débil postula que la redistribución del ingreso es beneficiosa para algunos y perjudica a otros. Utilizando una muestra representativa a nivel nacional de 57.932 encuestados alemanes de 16 estados alemanes a lo largo de 30 años (Estudio 1) y una muestra de 112.876 encuestados de 33 países a lo largo de 24 años (Estudio 2), encontré que los cambios de redistribución de ingresos dentro del estado y dentro de la nación a lo largo del tiempo se asociaron con la satisfacción con la vida. Los modelos predijeron que una reducción del 10% en el coeficiente Gini mediante la redistribución del ingreso en Alemania aumentaba la satisfacción con la vida en la misma medida que un aumento del 37% en los ingresos anuales (Estudio 1) y una reducción del 5% en Gini a través de la redistribución del ingreso eracomo un un aumento del 11% en el PIB (Estudio 2). Estas asociaciones fueron positivas a través de características individuales, nacionales y culturales. Los aumentos en la redistribución del ingreso predijeron una mayor satisfacción para los contribuyentes y los receptores de bienestar, para los progresistas y conservadores, y para los pobres y los ricos. Estos hallazgos apoyan la hipótesis fuerte de redistribución del ingreso y sugieren que las políticas de redistribución pueden desempeñar un papel importante en el bienestar social.]
Saturday, August 26, 2017
Did You Reject Me for Someone Else? Rejections That Are Comparative Feel Worse
Did You Reject Me for Someone Else? Rejections That Are Comparative Feel Worse. Sebastian Deri, Emily M. Zitek. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167217726988
Abstract: Rejections differ. For those who are rejected, one important difference is whether they are rejected for someone else (comparative rejection) or no one at all (noncomparative rejection). We examined the effect of this distinction on emotional reactions to a rejection in four studies (N = 608), one of which was fully preregistered. Our results show that ***comparative rejections feel worse than noncomparative rejections and that this may be because such rejections lead to an increased sense of exclusion and decreased belonging. Furthermore, we found evidence that, by default, people react to a rejection as though it were comparative—that is, in the absence of any information about whether they have been rejected for someone or no one, they react as negatively as if they were rejected for someone***. Our discussion focuses on the implications of these findings, including why people often seek out information in the wake of a rejection.
Abstract: Rejections differ. For those who are rejected, one important difference is whether they are rejected for someone else (comparative rejection) or no one at all (noncomparative rejection). We examined the effect of this distinction on emotional reactions to a rejection in four studies (N = 608), one of which was fully preregistered. Our results show that ***comparative rejections feel worse than noncomparative rejections and that this may be because such rejections lead to an increased sense of exclusion and decreased belonging. Furthermore, we found evidence that, by default, people react to a rejection as though it were comparative—that is, in the absence of any information about whether they have been rejected for someone or no one, they react as negatively as if they were rejected for someone***. Our discussion focuses on the implications of these findings, including why people often seek out information in the wake of a rejection.
Review of Thomas Laqueur's The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains
Back from the Underworld. By Marina Warner. Review of Thomas Laqueur's The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n16/marina-warner/back-from-the-underworld
The London Review of Books, Vol. 39 No. 16 · Aug 17 2017, pages 19-23 | 4943 words
ISSN 0260-9592
The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains by Thomas Laqueur
Princeton, 711 pp, £27.95, October 2015, ISBN 978 0 691 15778 8
The work of the dead used to be intercession. It was a mutual striving; if we, who were still alive, prayed for them, they would do what they could for us. Chantries were established – and generously funded – to keep the work going on a daily basis, their members singing at the behest of the dead, and praying to those who, purified in the fires of the afterlife, could now ask God and Mary to reprieve those still suffering for their sins, and help us ahead of time for ours. But when this eschatological perspective weakened, the activity of the dead didn’t come to a stop, which was surprising: the Reformation and the Enlightenment combined to close down (almost) indulgences and remission of sins, but the liveliness of the dead in their claims on us and their presence in the world didn’t dim.
Secularism, reason, scepticism don’t bring disenchantment, Thomas Laqueur argues in this monumental study, the harvest of more than ten years’ concentrated exploring of archives, tombstones, battlefields and furnace design. Laqueur principally scrutinises developments since around 1700, mostly in England, but he places them in a very longue durée (he likes the phrase ‘deep time’) and embeds modern inventions, such as the urban garden cemetery, the war memorial in situ, and the crematorium, in a far-reaching and widely geographical cultural history that ranges from the Towers of Silence of the Zoroastrians, where the loved one was left to be pecked clean by vultures, to the tragedy of Antigone, who disobeys the law when she cannot accept that her brother Polynices should suffer a similar fate on the plain outside Thebes.
The Work of the Dead is packed with information, surprises, unaccustomed lore and learning, and Laqueur shows throughout a sturdy curiosity, as he digs unflinchingly around and into his chosen topic (in this respect it follows on from his previous magnum opus on the history of masturbation). He adopts the Annales school’s panoramic sweep, punctuated by boreholes giving microscopically detailed analyses of samples from the soil of social history: he discusses the shocking exclusion of Dissenters, Catholics, suicides and unbaptised babies from their local parish churchyard, and the long acrimonious wrangles and even riots that sometimes ensued when vicars tried to impose their rules of admission, and parishioners rejected them. He quotes in close-up from a heart-wrenching sequence of letters between a farmhand, Emily Chitticks, and her sweetheart, Private Will Martin; five of the 23 letters she wrote were returned, inscribed KILLED. In one, she told him: ‘I have dreamt that you were back home with me dear and the most strange thing about them, you are always in civilian clothes when I dream of you & and I have never seen you in those dear … I hope that will come true.’ When he was killed, in March 1917, she began the long struggle to find the whereabouts of his body. Though bits of news raised her hopes, he was declared missing along with thousands of others in the Battle of the Somme. She asked to be buried with the bundle of their letters.
Burial practices and ceremonies that seem immemorial to us now were new-fangled and strange not that long ago, it turns out: it is not known who proposed the tomb of the Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey, and many were doubtful about the prospect (not British enough, or Protestant). But the process went ahead, with much ritual: bags of bones from four unidentified victims of the battlefield were placed on a table; then, at midnight, a general wearing a blindfold picked one lot of remains; they were sent under escort across the Channel on a destroyer, and from Dover ‘guarded as the most precious of relics until the ceremonies on the next day’. Not since Henry V’s bones were brought back from France (after his body had been boiled to clean them) can there have been such a solemn translation. The Cenotaph in the Mall – which is empty – was dedicated the same day. Edwin Lutyens only provided a sketch, as he thought it was going to be temporary. No one had thought this idea would catch on either (again too foreign, too Catholic). But it did, resoundingly. The idea of honouring the Unknown Soldier recurred around the same time everywhere, Laqueur tells us. Such monuments express the hope that no one will be left out: Old Hamlet will not return to call out reproachfully ‘Remember me’; there will be no 13th fairy to disrupt the peace and ask for vengeance.
Laqueur’s scrupulous historical foraging also brings centre stage some extraordinary characters who, in the name of progress, hygiene, classical ideals and ancestral custom, flung themselves into long disputes that eventually led to current, commonly held tenets about the attentions fitting to a corpse. William Price, d.1893, was an arch druid in Wales, a surgeon, a Chartist, a vegetarian, a philoprogenetive advocate of free love, who called his child, born in his late years, Jesu Grist (sic). When the baby died, he tried to burn him on a pyre, according to ancient Celtic custom (he claimed). He tried again, when another of his many children died. After each attempt, he was charged, but unexpectedly, he was in tune with the zeitgeist and found not guilty. The Daily Telegraph stated that it would be ‘highly advantageous to the cause of sanitary reform if the fantastic tricks recently played by an eccentric Welsh octogenarian … became indirectly the means to bring … a little more common sense to bear … on the important subject of cremation’.
Yet, entertaining as all this is, in a macabre key, the dead are hard to think about – and, in many ways, to read about. Unlike animals, which Lévi-Strauss declared were not only good to eat but bon à penser, too, I found that I averted my eyes, so to speak, several times as I was reading this book. Not because of the infinite and irreversible sadness of mortality, or because of the grue, the fetor, the decay, the pervasive morbidity – though Laqueur’s gallows humour about scientific successes in the calcination of corpses can be a bit strong – but because the dead present an enigma that can’t be grasped: they are always there in mind, they come back in dreams, live in memory, and if they don’t, if they’re forgotten as so many millions of them must be, that is even more disturbing, somehow reprehensible. The disappeared are the unquietest ghosts. Simone Weil writes that the Iliad is a poem that shows how ‘force … turns man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him.’ But Laqueur is surely right to inquire why that thing, the ‘disenchanted corpse … bereft, vulnerable, abject’, is a very different kind of thing from the cushion I am sitting on or even my iPad (which keeps giving signs of a mind of its own). I have always liked Mme du Deffand’s comment, when asked if she believed in ghosts. A philosopher and a free thinker, she even so replied: ‘Non, mais j’en ai peur.’ (‘No, but I am frightened of them.’)
The book keeps returning to the conundrum perfectly set by Diogenes, when he said that after his death, his body should be tossed over a wall for dogs to eat. This is logical, rational, perhaps even ecological (Laqueur discusses many suggestions about using mortal remains for compost and fertiliser), but no society has taken the Cynic philosopher’s advice (the Parsee towers are a place apart), and when the dead are left in the street, the sight – the neglect – rightly inspires horror and shame in all who know of it. Yet, if you believe in a soul, why should the husk matter? And conversely, if you believe that there is nothing more, then the corpse is not a person either, let alone that person. But every instinct, every human feeling in the cultural world Laqueur writes about goes against Diogenes.
Since Derek Parfit’s death, there has been discussion about his Buddhist sympathies, because he countered conventional ideas about the integrity of a person over time, and closes Reasons and Persons with a suggestive musing on a Buddhist term for an individual, ‘santana, a “stream”’. It’s interesting to contrast this idea with the picture that forms from Laqueur’s scrupulous sifting of the archives: the work we feel the dead ask us to perform is bound up inextricably with our prevailing view of the person as an integer – not a stream. The manner of our leaving the world defines us as unique selves, continuously unified from birth to death. In this perspective, Laqueur’s book presents a continuation of other mighty endeavours: Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity and Jerrold Seigel’s The Idea of the Self, both studies in what it means to be an individual. In answer to this, the dwindling of trust in an immortal soul has shifted the onus onto the perishable body, with proportionately highly wrought standards of respect owed to that ambiguous thing.
In the 16th century, the medical cabinets of universities such as Bologna and Florence contained wax models of bodies for study; these models contained human body parts, and sometimes whole bodies were conserved. A pope had expressly given permission for such uses of the dead, in the interests of knowledge; yet in 18th-century England, Hogarth’s horrific scene of an autopsy (where a dog is lapping up the discarded innards), shows that to be used for science was dreadful, fitting punishment of the damned in the here and now, and medical tomb-robbers set so much horror and disgust reverberating that Mary Shelley conceived her monster as made from different body parts. Since then, reverence for the mortal body in its final dissolution has been continuously rising; the reason lies in its compact with individuality, a compact reaffirmed by DNA, iris scanning and other forensic recognition techniques that presuppose absolute uniqueness.
This singular self has its habitation (the body) and a name, and these are attached in death to the arc of a story over time, which posthumous acts of memorialisation attempt to bring to an honourable and coherent conclusion. Laqueur uses the word ‘dénouement’ to describe this goal. He avoids the word ‘closure’, as used by therapists. Obsequies and customary rites have become necessary to what is more of a nouement – a tying up of loose ends. The playwright Timberlake Wertenbaker has recalled the figure of the ‘Designated Mourner’, as dramatised by Wallace Shawn in his play of 1996, in relation to current crises, someone who, as in many countries today (Greece and Egypt, for example), takes on the role – the bardic, priestly role – of reciting the life and deeds of the dead person. Obituaries are not, however, as old a custom as one might assume, Laqueur tells us, and the trend today is moving towards acts of public mourning which can travel far and wide online: the memorial which was set up at Tate Britain to Khadija Saye, the young artist-photographer who died with her mother in the Grenfell fire, and the ode that Ben Okri wrote the same night are instances.
If any part is missing in the triangulation of body, name and mourning ceremony an injury has been done. This is one reason for the miasma that hangs over Grenfell Tower and maddens the survivors. A tenant cries out: ‘Why can’t I have my family back?’ ‘We are doing our utmost best,’ says one of the many volunteers, ‘to get their loved ones back.’ Forensic teams – police and others – have been conducting a ‘finger-tip search’ through the ashes to find remains which can then be analysed for DNA and restored to the bereaved. The blackened building, with its flayed grid and blind windows, may look like a ruin of war, but it also looms like a macabre charnel house chimney, a huge tomb of unidentified and unsolemnised dead. It stands like a stele, the ancient grave markers which were inscribed with the names of their occupants, often calling out to the passers-by: siste viator (‘stay, wayfarer’) – the voices of the dead imagined to be speaking still and demanding attention.
The dead establish community and cultural memory, and forms of disposal offer a vision of society that’s both a testimony and a self-portrait. Grenfell Tower has become a monument to the precariat, in this country, now. In All the Names (1997), his poignant novel about the yearning to encompass everyone, José Saramago issues a warning. The protagonist tries to stop a nurse washing a minor scrape on his knee, but she says: ‘No no, I have to clean them.’ He replies: ‘Once mine have healed, they’ll leave nothing but a few small scars that will disappear in time.’ To which the nurse answers: ‘Ah, yes, wounds heal over on the body, but in the report they always always stay open, they neither close up nor disappear.’
*
In the course of the story Laqueur tells, death is a constant scandal against the living, but the wounds are becoming more visible. Tranquil, neighbourly country churchyards, such as the ones painted by Constable and elegised by Thomas Gray, were superseded by huge cemeteries in urban parklands, which no longer united the dead by faith or birth and dwelling place but according to the newer bonds of wealth, occupation and social status. Some of the book’s most powerful passages turn to the killing fields and the enormous spooky cemeteries of the Somme created after the First World War was over. These entailed the exhumation of hundreds of bodies, the assiduous identification and reassembly of parts, and their reburial in solemn serried rows, to depict the war as awful, yet sublime, and its victims as heroic and their deaths worthwhile. Through these stately monuments and encyclopedic inventories, the nation cleaned up the story of the war. ‘This constituted an aesthetic obfuscation of reality,’ Laqueur recognises, ‘But there was no alternative. As the history of sites of horror makes clear, they cannot remain as they were to become shrines to themselves. It was also impossible not to memorialise the dead of war.’ The museums at Auschwitz and other concentration camps don’t quite bear out his statement, as he knows (he has written powerfully about them), but the mud-churned, incinerated fields of the Somme couldn’t be preserved as they were.
These cemeteries also established several principles that have become fundamental to the work of the dead in modern times: first a grave has to contain a body; when the body – the person – was lost, the name would sometimes make up for its absence, appearing on the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing, for example, among the long lists chiselled into stone to ‘live for ever more’. Memorial tablets and cairns spread through all the countries involved in that war and the next: often marked out by bombshells, rockets and other weapons. But a new, sacralising feature was added to the honour paid to the dead: the cemeteries and memorials were built where the victims had fallen, or at least nearby. The place became part of the commemoration: as in medieval pilgrimage to the site of Thomas à Becket’s murder, or modern pilgrimage to the Church of the Spilled Blood in St Petersburg, where the cobbled pavement on which Alexander II was shot and fatally wounded in 1881 is enshrined in situ in the new church’s floor. In 2014, the artist Chloe Dewe Mathews travelled to the places in France where deserters had been executed and took a photograph at first light of the empty field; the resulting sequence, Shot at Dawn, is one of the most powerful acts of memory the centenary inspired. Hic jacet mattered, and still matters, in this new, secular form of ritual enchantment.
Some families resisted the vast new necropolises, and smuggled back their dead – in fishing boats, or rolled up in carpets – rather than let them lie in a corner of a foreign field, however much ‘a body of England’s’ might consecrate and alter its character. But since then, the exact place of death has taken hold of people’s imaginations: wayside shrines spring up, with cards and messages and bouquets and favourite objects attached to trees or motorway barriers or set against walls where a fatal accident or murder has taken place; the spot above the tunnel in Paris where Princess Diana died is now a cult site; and in London white bicycles, covered in flowers, are set up where a cyclist has died – as both memorial and protest.
The battlefield/graveyard can be moved and remade – on a smaller scale. Every year on Armistice Day, tiny tombs, decorated with poppies, regimental colours and badges, and bearing the names of all the soldiers who died in the various campaigns, are laid out all around Westminster Abbey, filling the lawns on either side of the path. These ceremonies echo earlier religious re-enactments – the Temple of Jerusalem rebuilt in replica, Calvary reprised in the Stations of the Cross. Laqueur reproduces in colour the IMAX style spectacular poppy installation, Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red; when the artists Paul Cummins and Tom Piper cascaded thousands of scarlet ceramic sculptures from the battlements of the Tower of London (888,246, to be precise, one for each of the fallen) to mark the centenary of the First World War, they imported the significance of massacre to a new site, and it met with huge popular acclaim. Alongside such new national rites, cinema plays an increasingly vivid role in bringing the dead before us again, and narrating the past: sometimes it is the recent past, as in the case of Apocalypse Now (1979); in other, more distant cases, it has the effect of closing the gap of time. Twelve Years a Slave and the current blockbuster Dunkirk follow in this memorial tradition, as does the TV historian Dan Snow, when he advocates ‘augmented reality software’ to help us relive Passchendaele. These are national epics, reckonings wrought with all the latest resources of ‘full immersion’ – the equivalent of re-enacting the Passion of Christ in Seville’s Semana Santa with live performances by actors and maximum real-life verisimilitude in the images.
Some memorials try to include everyone, victims and perpetrators, from all sides of the conflict. Homer honours the dead on both sides in the Trojan War and he gives us more than two hundred names – Alice Oswald opens her fine ‘excavation’ of the Iliad, which is explicitly called Memorial, by listing them. But this list, horribly long as it is, does not remember all who died at Troy. The roll call of the fallen doesn’t include women, for a start. Or children. By contrast, the Graves Registration Commission/War Graves Commission set out to name every single person who died in the First World War, and, often, the animals, too; as they compiled their records, they paid far more attention to the corpse of each soldier/ nurse/orderly/horse than the strategists had done to their living selves. Civilians are harder to count – they vanish from the registers for various reasons. As at Grenfell Tower, collateral damage doesn’t show up in databases as accurately as enlisted men on army muster rolls. Laqueur quotes the spare, fierce poem that Zbigniew Herbert wrote after martial law was imposed in Poland in December 1981, which is called ‘Mr Cogito on the Need for Precision’. The poem speaks far beyond the occasion of its making:
But in these matters
Accuracy is necessary
One cannot get it wrong
Even in a single case
In spite of everything
We are our brothers’ keepers.
‘We are our brothers’ keepers,’ and the way we can watch out for one another is by attending to the specificity of each life and person. The most surprising – to my mind at least – revelation in The Work of the Dead is that the precision of archiving by the clerisies of the past and the digital databases of the present are deeply entangled with the history of intimacy and personal value. Mr Cogito wants to know where someone’s mortal remains might be, Laqueur writes, ‘because beginning in the late 19th century ordinary people wanted to know … The massive records of the Great War bear witness to both the technology and the emotional infrastructure that made knowing possible and necessary.’ Ordinary people wanted to know and they can know because a combination of skills has made it more feasible than ever before. It is very sad – and horrible – that the search for the body of Corrie McKeague, the RAF gunner who disappeared last year, has finally been called off, after tons of rubbish in the landfill where he was buried have been sifted unavailingly. Such an undertaking couldn’t even have been thought of before current electronics (his final whereabouts were tracked on his phone). For the same reasons, it has become possible to demand retrospective interventions on the long dead. The exhumation of Salvador Dalí, to prove a paternity suit, exemplifies this trend (he was found to be whole and entire, his moustache still angled at ten past ten – a miracle!).
Science weirdly spurs on the pursuit of the disenchanted corpse, carrying us into invisible and impalpable dimensions of experience. The invention of telegraphy and photography were essential to psychic experiments to bring back the dead, and after the First World War many survivors visited high street mediums like Ada Deane and William Hope, to hear news from the other side. The pages of spirit photograph albums reveal how many varieties of affectionate ties held people together, as the bereaved sought to contact lost loved ones: siblings, same-sex friendships and intergenerational bonds are all caught by the absurd pathos of the ghost portraits and rapped out messages. Séances seem to have acted as therapeutic consolation: the dead reported they were very happy where they were, in the non-religious uplands of spiritualist heaven, according to the reports the revenants brought to the living. The anthropologist William A. Christian Jr has amassed an extraordinary collection of photographs collaged on postcards to circulate and prolong memories of the absent, the missing and the dead. His recent study, The Stranger, the Tears, the Photograph, the Touch: Divine Presence in Spain and Europe since 1500, supports Laqueur’s accounts of the many ways new institutions, like the postal service, and new technologies, like photography, have been recruited to deal with death.[Central European University Press, 310 pp., £44, March, 978 6 15 522529 1.] The dead can clamour more urgently for our attention today than they did because of contemporary advances, not in spite of them.
In his third part, ‘Names of the Dead’, Laqueur turns to ‘necronominalism’. Parfit’s thoughts again show up the contrast between humanist ideals of the individual self and the premises of the Buddha, who declared that a name is ‘only a name, for no person is found there … There exists no Individual, it is only a conventional name given to a set to elements.’ Opposing this view, the Mormons reign supreme, the champion archivists of people who have been and gone; in a volume filled with brain-toppling towers of numbers, these are among the most startling. The Utah genealogists aim to create a community in death, in the same way as a village churchyard did, but theirs – the Church of Latter Day Saints – is global. The Mormons perform retrospective baptisms, a practice that has caused protests when, for example, Jewish figures like Anne Frank have been made ‘saints’. Nevertheless necronominalism is the order of existence here in the West, and our own magical thinking underlies the public chanting of the names of the victims of Aids or of 9/11 – the ritual strives both to exorcise the horror and to summon the vanished back to memory.
Laqueur’s research for this book over the last decade couldn’t take stock of the effect of social media on the culture of mortal remains, but he clearly anticipates the consequences of the unprecedented access to information that they offer. On the one hand, bureaucratic data-gathering and censuses act as forms of surveillance and control, abolishing privacy and individual rights, and on the other they offer unforeseen opportunities for pursuing personal lines of inquiry and crafting subjectivities and inclinations (a recent women’s questionnaire I was sent included 26 different genders with a blank box if none of the above applied). At the same time a story can now move so fast and become so widely accepted that it sweeps away hints and traces of alternatives, and it’s then tough to redraft and dislodge. Reckoning with these standardised fables convenues (as Voltaire quipped about history in general) sets a compelling task for thinkers and writers in all fields, not only history. Unearthing hitherto unheard voices and silenced stories has become a central stratagem of the living in relation to the hubbub of the endless data archive we live with. ‘Not just some, but all writing of the narrative kind, and perhaps all writing, is motivated, deep down, by a fear of and fascination with mortality – by a desire to make the risky trip to the Underworld, and to bring something or someone back from the dead,’ Margaret Atwood suggested in her fine Empson Lectures. The aim is often redress, redress achieved through imaginative acts of memory, through exhuming the dead, as in Zong!, a remarkable prose-poem written in 2008 by M. NourbeSe Philip, which takes off from the notorious incident in 1781 when the captain of the slave ship Zong threw 133 slaves overboard and then claimed insurance on their loss. Using only the words of the surviving legal report, Philip cuts them up, scrambles and rearticulates them to produce a chorale of voices, rising on the page as if from the sea, while along the bottom of the page, she runs a litany of names from the regions in Africa they might have come from – and to which she, as a Trinidadian-Canadian, also traces her descent. Zong! deliberately turns a dry judicial decision into an anthem, a multi-vocal lament and act of mourning and resistance to historical amnesia on behalf of a group of the utterly disappeared. She has performed it solo and also with a chorus, and the recitation takes on the character of a ceremony, a conjuration – again, a secularisation of an ancient mode of memorialising, and a very contemporary way of defining a life by the momentousness of its end.
In accordance with the fluid subjectivities offered by technology, the contemporary desire to be reunited with the body of the loved one has moved into a more personal, subjective key: the urn or small casket in which what’s left might be placed is often taken home for the family to hold private, innovatory rituals – carrying them back to a country the dead left a long time ago, or scattering the ashes in a favourite spot – Laqueur mentions a group of friends choosing a tree they liked to pee against on camping trips. He is concerned with these continuities and innovations.
Bespoke funeral rites are increasingly available: Walt Disney was an early subject of deep freezing for eternity, a modern form of pharaonic dream; in 1996, two years after he died, the embalmed body of the artist Ed Kienholz, was provided with a dollar, a bottle of red wine, a pack of cards and the ashes of his dog, set up at the wheel of his vintage Packard, and then allowed to drift and fall into the grave to the sound of bagpipes. More soberingly, Laqueur’s narrative also illuminates how and why the distressing struggle over the dying baby Charlie Gard was so acute. In respect to the dead and dying, personal feelings have been prevailing ever more strongly over institutional bodies’ authority; social media, with some members of the press clamouring support, join forces to claim rights over the bodies of loved ones.
The book comes to its close with open-ended reflections on the new difficulties, such as the question of ‘the right to die’, and speculation about the protracted business of dying in the future. The past is prologue, and Laqueur’s line of argument promises that increasing private pressure will determine the fate of mortal remains. In her tightly coiled new novel, Home Fire, Kamila Shamsie reimagines Antigone in relation to jihadism today.[Bloomsbury, 272 pp., £16.99, August, 978 1 4088 8677 9.] If Creon had any support in the past, her dramatic reworking convinces us that, even in these extreme circumstances, twitter storms could fall upon him from every side; the call of the dead on the living for honour to be paid to the body, the seemingly indissoluble union of personhood and body in a supposed secular age, and the privatisation of social structures that used to help contain the passions of love and grief and desire mean that Antigone is more than ever a heroine of our time.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n16/marina-warner/back-from-the-underworld
The London Review of Books, Vol. 39 No. 16 · Aug 17 2017, pages 19-23 | 4943 words
ISSN 0260-9592
The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains by Thomas Laqueur
Princeton, 711 pp, £27.95, October 2015, ISBN 978 0 691 15778 8
The work of the dead used to be intercession. It was a mutual striving; if we, who were still alive, prayed for them, they would do what they could for us. Chantries were established – and generously funded – to keep the work going on a daily basis, their members singing at the behest of the dead, and praying to those who, purified in the fires of the afterlife, could now ask God and Mary to reprieve those still suffering for their sins, and help us ahead of time for ours. But when this eschatological perspective weakened, the activity of the dead didn’t come to a stop, which was surprising: the Reformation and the Enlightenment combined to close down (almost) indulgences and remission of sins, but the liveliness of the dead in their claims on us and their presence in the world didn’t dim.
Secularism, reason, scepticism don’t bring disenchantment, Thomas Laqueur argues in this monumental study, the harvest of more than ten years’ concentrated exploring of archives, tombstones, battlefields and furnace design. Laqueur principally scrutinises developments since around 1700, mostly in England, but he places them in a very longue durée (he likes the phrase ‘deep time’) and embeds modern inventions, such as the urban garden cemetery, the war memorial in situ, and the crematorium, in a far-reaching and widely geographical cultural history that ranges from the Towers of Silence of the Zoroastrians, where the loved one was left to be pecked clean by vultures, to the tragedy of Antigone, who disobeys the law when she cannot accept that her brother Polynices should suffer a similar fate on the plain outside Thebes.
The Work of the Dead is packed with information, surprises, unaccustomed lore and learning, and Laqueur shows throughout a sturdy curiosity, as he digs unflinchingly around and into his chosen topic (in this respect it follows on from his previous magnum opus on the history of masturbation). He adopts the Annales school’s panoramic sweep, punctuated by boreholes giving microscopically detailed analyses of samples from the soil of social history: he discusses the shocking exclusion of Dissenters, Catholics, suicides and unbaptised babies from their local parish churchyard, and the long acrimonious wrangles and even riots that sometimes ensued when vicars tried to impose their rules of admission, and parishioners rejected them. He quotes in close-up from a heart-wrenching sequence of letters between a farmhand, Emily Chitticks, and her sweetheart, Private Will Martin; five of the 23 letters she wrote were returned, inscribed KILLED. In one, she told him: ‘I have dreamt that you were back home with me dear and the most strange thing about them, you are always in civilian clothes when I dream of you & and I have never seen you in those dear … I hope that will come true.’ When he was killed, in March 1917, she began the long struggle to find the whereabouts of his body. Though bits of news raised her hopes, he was declared missing along with thousands of others in the Battle of the Somme. She asked to be buried with the bundle of their letters.
Burial practices and ceremonies that seem immemorial to us now were new-fangled and strange not that long ago, it turns out: it is not known who proposed the tomb of the Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey, and many were doubtful about the prospect (not British enough, or Protestant). But the process went ahead, with much ritual: bags of bones from four unidentified victims of the battlefield were placed on a table; then, at midnight, a general wearing a blindfold picked one lot of remains; they were sent under escort across the Channel on a destroyer, and from Dover ‘guarded as the most precious of relics until the ceremonies on the next day’. Not since Henry V’s bones were brought back from France (after his body had been boiled to clean them) can there have been such a solemn translation. The Cenotaph in the Mall – which is empty – was dedicated the same day. Edwin Lutyens only provided a sketch, as he thought it was going to be temporary. No one had thought this idea would catch on either (again too foreign, too Catholic). But it did, resoundingly. The idea of honouring the Unknown Soldier recurred around the same time everywhere, Laqueur tells us. Such monuments express the hope that no one will be left out: Old Hamlet will not return to call out reproachfully ‘Remember me’; there will be no 13th fairy to disrupt the peace and ask for vengeance.
Laqueur’s scrupulous historical foraging also brings centre stage some extraordinary characters who, in the name of progress, hygiene, classical ideals and ancestral custom, flung themselves into long disputes that eventually led to current, commonly held tenets about the attentions fitting to a corpse. William Price, d.1893, was an arch druid in Wales, a surgeon, a Chartist, a vegetarian, a philoprogenetive advocate of free love, who called his child, born in his late years, Jesu Grist (sic). When the baby died, he tried to burn him on a pyre, according to ancient Celtic custom (he claimed). He tried again, when another of his many children died. After each attempt, he was charged, but unexpectedly, he was in tune with the zeitgeist and found not guilty. The Daily Telegraph stated that it would be ‘highly advantageous to the cause of sanitary reform if the fantastic tricks recently played by an eccentric Welsh octogenarian … became indirectly the means to bring … a little more common sense to bear … on the important subject of cremation’.
Yet, entertaining as all this is, in a macabre key, the dead are hard to think about – and, in many ways, to read about. Unlike animals, which Lévi-Strauss declared were not only good to eat but bon à penser, too, I found that I averted my eyes, so to speak, several times as I was reading this book. Not because of the infinite and irreversible sadness of mortality, or because of the grue, the fetor, the decay, the pervasive morbidity – though Laqueur’s gallows humour about scientific successes in the calcination of corpses can be a bit strong – but because the dead present an enigma that can’t be grasped: they are always there in mind, they come back in dreams, live in memory, and if they don’t, if they’re forgotten as so many millions of them must be, that is even more disturbing, somehow reprehensible. The disappeared are the unquietest ghosts. Simone Weil writes that the Iliad is a poem that shows how ‘force … turns man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him.’ But Laqueur is surely right to inquire why that thing, the ‘disenchanted corpse … bereft, vulnerable, abject’, is a very different kind of thing from the cushion I am sitting on or even my iPad (which keeps giving signs of a mind of its own). I have always liked Mme du Deffand’s comment, when asked if she believed in ghosts. A philosopher and a free thinker, she even so replied: ‘Non, mais j’en ai peur.’ (‘No, but I am frightened of them.’)
The book keeps returning to the conundrum perfectly set by Diogenes, when he said that after his death, his body should be tossed over a wall for dogs to eat. This is logical, rational, perhaps even ecological (Laqueur discusses many suggestions about using mortal remains for compost and fertiliser), but no society has taken the Cynic philosopher’s advice (the Parsee towers are a place apart), and when the dead are left in the street, the sight – the neglect – rightly inspires horror and shame in all who know of it. Yet, if you believe in a soul, why should the husk matter? And conversely, if you believe that there is nothing more, then the corpse is not a person either, let alone that person. But every instinct, every human feeling in the cultural world Laqueur writes about goes against Diogenes.
Since Derek Parfit’s death, there has been discussion about his Buddhist sympathies, because he countered conventional ideas about the integrity of a person over time, and closes Reasons and Persons with a suggestive musing on a Buddhist term for an individual, ‘santana, a “stream”’. It’s interesting to contrast this idea with the picture that forms from Laqueur’s scrupulous sifting of the archives: the work we feel the dead ask us to perform is bound up inextricably with our prevailing view of the person as an integer – not a stream. The manner of our leaving the world defines us as unique selves, continuously unified from birth to death. In this perspective, Laqueur’s book presents a continuation of other mighty endeavours: Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity and Jerrold Seigel’s The Idea of the Self, both studies in what it means to be an individual. In answer to this, the dwindling of trust in an immortal soul has shifted the onus onto the perishable body, with proportionately highly wrought standards of respect owed to that ambiguous thing.
In the 16th century, the medical cabinets of universities such as Bologna and Florence contained wax models of bodies for study; these models contained human body parts, and sometimes whole bodies were conserved. A pope had expressly given permission for such uses of the dead, in the interests of knowledge; yet in 18th-century England, Hogarth’s horrific scene of an autopsy (where a dog is lapping up the discarded innards), shows that to be used for science was dreadful, fitting punishment of the damned in the here and now, and medical tomb-robbers set so much horror and disgust reverberating that Mary Shelley conceived her monster as made from different body parts. Since then, reverence for the mortal body in its final dissolution has been continuously rising; the reason lies in its compact with individuality, a compact reaffirmed by DNA, iris scanning and other forensic recognition techniques that presuppose absolute uniqueness.
This singular self has its habitation (the body) and a name, and these are attached in death to the arc of a story over time, which posthumous acts of memorialisation attempt to bring to an honourable and coherent conclusion. Laqueur uses the word ‘dénouement’ to describe this goal. He avoids the word ‘closure’, as used by therapists. Obsequies and customary rites have become necessary to what is more of a nouement – a tying up of loose ends. The playwright Timberlake Wertenbaker has recalled the figure of the ‘Designated Mourner’, as dramatised by Wallace Shawn in his play of 1996, in relation to current crises, someone who, as in many countries today (Greece and Egypt, for example), takes on the role – the bardic, priestly role – of reciting the life and deeds of the dead person. Obituaries are not, however, as old a custom as one might assume, Laqueur tells us, and the trend today is moving towards acts of public mourning which can travel far and wide online: the memorial which was set up at Tate Britain to Khadija Saye, the young artist-photographer who died with her mother in the Grenfell fire, and the ode that Ben Okri wrote the same night are instances.
If any part is missing in the triangulation of body, name and mourning ceremony an injury has been done. This is one reason for the miasma that hangs over Grenfell Tower and maddens the survivors. A tenant cries out: ‘Why can’t I have my family back?’ ‘We are doing our utmost best,’ says one of the many volunteers, ‘to get their loved ones back.’ Forensic teams – police and others – have been conducting a ‘finger-tip search’ through the ashes to find remains which can then be analysed for DNA and restored to the bereaved. The blackened building, with its flayed grid and blind windows, may look like a ruin of war, but it also looms like a macabre charnel house chimney, a huge tomb of unidentified and unsolemnised dead. It stands like a stele, the ancient grave markers which were inscribed with the names of their occupants, often calling out to the passers-by: siste viator (‘stay, wayfarer’) – the voices of the dead imagined to be speaking still and demanding attention.
The dead establish community and cultural memory, and forms of disposal offer a vision of society that’s both a testimony and a self-portrait. Grenfell Tower has become a monument to the precariat, in this country, now. In All the Names (1997), his poignant novel about the yearning to encompass everyone, José Saramago issues a warning. The protagonist tries to stop a nurse washing a minor scrape on his knee, but she says: ‘No no, I have to clean them.’ He replies: ‘Once mine have healed, they’ll leave nothing but a few small scars that will disappear in time.’ To which the nurse answers: ‘Ah, yes, wounds heal over on the body, but in the report they always always stay open, they neither close up nor disappear.’
*
In the course of the story Laqueur tells, death is a constant scandal against the living, but the wounds are becoming more visible. Tranquil, neighbourly country churchyards, such as the ones painted by Constable and elegised by Thomas Gray, were superseded by huge cemeteries in urban parklands, which no longer united the dead by faith or birth and dwelling place but according to the newer bonds of wealth, occupation and social status. Some of the book’s most powerful passages turn to the killing fields and the enormous spooky cemeteries of the Somme created after the First World War was over. These entailed the exhumation of hundreds of bodies, the assiduous identification and reassembly of parts, and their reburial in solemn serried rows, to depict the war as awful, yet sublime, and its victims as heroic and their deaths worthwhile. Through these stately monuments and encyclopedic inventories, the nation cleaned up the story of the war. ‘This constituted an aesthetic obfuscation of reality,’ Laqueur recognises, ‘But there was no alternative. As the history of sites of horror makes clear, they cannot remain as they were to become shrines to themselves. It was also impossible not to memorialise the dead of war.’ The museums at Auschwitz and other concentration camps don’t quite bear out his statement, as he knows (he has written powerfully about them), but the mud-churned, incinerated fields of the Somme couldn’t be preserved as they were.
These cemeteries also established several principles that have become fundamental to the work of the dead in modern times: first a grave has to contain a body; when the body – the person – was lost, the name would sometimes make up for its absence, appearing on the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing, for example, among the long lists chiselled into stone to ‘live for ever more’. Memorial tablets and cairns spread through all the countries involved in that war and the next: often marked out by bombshells, rockets and other weapons. But a new, sacralising feature was added to the honour paid to the dead: the cemeteries and memorials were built where the victims had fallen, or at least nearby. The place became part of the commemoration: as in medieval pilgrimage to the site of Thomas à Becket’s murder, or modern pilgrimage to the Church of the Spilled Blood in St Petersburg, where the cobbled pavement on which Alexander II was shot and fatally wounded in 1881 is enshrined in situ in the new church’s floor. In 2014, the artist Chloe Dewe Mathews travelled to the places in France where deserters had been executed and took a photograph at first light of the empty field; the resulting sequence, Shot at Dawn, is one of the most powerful acts of memory the centenary inspired. Hic jacet mattered, and still matters, in this new, secular form of ritual enchantment.
Some families resisted the vast new necropolises, and smuggled back their dead – in fishing boats, or rolled up in carpets – rather than let them lie in a corner of a foreign field, however much ‘a body of England’s’ might consecrate and alter its character. But since then, the exact place of death has taken hold of people’s imaginations: wayside shrines spring up, with cards and messages and bouquets and favourite objects attached to trees or motorway barriers or set against walls where a fatal accident or murder has taken place; the spot above the tunnel in Paris where Princess Diana died is now a cult site; and in London white bicycles, covered in flowers, are set up where a cyclist has died – as both memorial and protest.
The battlefield/graveyard can be moved and remade – on a smaller scale. Every year on Armistice Day, tiny tombs, decorated with poppies, regimental colours and badges, and bearing the names of all the soldiers who died in the various campaigns, are laid out all around Westminster Abbey, filling the lawns on either side of the path. These ceremonies echo earlier religious re-enactments – the Temple of Jerusalem rebuilt in replica, Calvary reprised in the Stations of the Cross. Laqueur reproduces in colour the IMAX style spectacular poppy installation, Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red; when the artists Paul Cummins and Tom Piper cascaded thousands of scarlet ceramic sculptures from the battlements of the Tower of London (888,246, to be precise, one for each of the fallen) to mark the centenary of the First World War, they imported the significance of massacre to a new site, and it met with huge popular acclaim. Alongside such new national rites, cinema plays an increasingly vivid role in bringing the dead before us again, and narrating the past: sometimes it is the recent past, as in the case of Apocalypse Now (1979); in other, more distant cases, it has the effect of closing the gap of time. Twelve Years a Slave and the current blockbuster Dunkirk follow in this memorial tradition, as does the TV historian Dan Snow, when he advocates ‘augmented reality software’ to help us relive Passchendaele. These are national epics, reckonings wrought with all the latest resources of ‘full immersion’ – the equivalent of re-enacting the Passion of Christ in Seville’s Semana Santa with live performances by actors and maximum real-life verisimilitude in the images.
Some memorials try to include everyone, victims and perpetrators, from all sides of the conflict. Homer honours the dead on both sides in the Trojan War and he gives us more than two hundred names – Alice Oswald opens her fine ‘excavation’ of the Iliad, which is explicitly called Memorial, by listing them. But this list, horribly long as it is, does not remember all who died at Troy. The roll call of the fallen doesn’t include women, for a start. Or children. By contrast, the Graves Registration Commission/War Graves Commission set out to name every single person who died in the First World War, and, often, the animals, too; as they compiled their records, they paid far more attention to the corpse of each soldier/ nurse/orderly/horse than the strategists had done to their living selves. Civilians are harder to count – they vanish from the registers for various reasons. As at Grenfell Tower, collateral damage doesn’t show up in databases as accurately as enlisted men on army muster rolls. Laqueur quotes the spare, fierce poem that Zbigniew Herbert wrote after martial law was imposed in Poland in December 1981, which is called ‘Mr Cogito on the Need for Precision’. The poem speaks far beyond the occasion of its making:
But in these matters
Accuracy is necessary
One cannot get it wrong
Even in a single case
In spite of everything
We are our brothers’ keepers.
‘We are our brothers’ keepers,’ and the way we can watch out for one another is by attending to the specificity of each life and person. The most surprising – to my mind at least – revelation in The Work of the Dead is that the precision of archiving by the clerisies of the past and the digital databases of the present are deeply entangled with the history of intimacy and personal value. Mr Cogito wants to know where someone’s mortal remains might be, Laqueur writes, ‘because beginning in the late 19th century ordinary people wanted to know … The massive records of the Great War bear witness to both the technology and the emotional infrastructure that made knowing possible and necessary.’ Ordinary people wanted to know and they can know because a combination of skills has made it more feasible than ever before. It is very sad – and horrible – that the search for the body of Corrie McKeague, the RAF gunner who disappeared last year, has finally been called off, after tons of rubbish in the landfill where he was buried have been sifted unavailingly. Such an undertaking couldn’t even have been thought of before current electronics (his final whereabouts were tracked on his phone). For the same reasons, it has become possible to demand retrospective interventions on the long dead. The exhumation of Salvador Dalí, to prove a paternity suit, exemplifies this trend (he was found to be whole and entire, his moustache still angled at ten past ten – a miracle!).
Science weirdly spurs on the pursuit of the disenchanted corpse, carrying us into invisible and impalpable dimensions of experience. The invention of telegraphy and photography were essential to psychic experiments to bring back the dead, and after the First World War many survivors visited high street mediums like Ada Deane and William Hope, to hear news from the other side. The pages of spirit photograph albums reveal how many varieties of affectionate ties held people together, as the bereaved sought to contact lost loved ones: siblings, same-sex friendships and intergenerational bonds are all caught by the absurd pathos of the ghost portraits and rapped out messages. Séances seem to have acted as therapeutic consolation: the dead reported they were very happy where they were, in the non-religious uplands of spiritualist heaven, according to the reports the revenants brought to the living. The anthropologist William A. Christian Jr has amassed an extraordinary collection of photographs collaged on postcards to circulate and prolong memories of the absent, the missing and the dead. His recent study, The Stranger, the Tears, the Photograph, the Touch: Divine Presence in Spain and Europe since 1500, supports Laqueur’s accounts of the many ways new institutions, like the postal service, and new technologies, like photography, have been recruited to deal with death.[Central European University Press, 310 pp., £44, March, 978 6 15 522529 1.] The dead can clamour more urgently for our attention today than they did because of contemporary advances, not in spite of them.
In his third part, ‘Names of the Dead’, Laqueur turns to ‘necronominalism’. Parfit’s thoughts again show up the contrast between humanist ideals of the individual self and the premises of the Buddha, who declared that a name is ‘only a name, for no person is found there … There exists no Individual, it is only a conventional name given to a set to elements.’ Opposing this view, the Mormons reign supreme, the champion archivists of people who have been and gone; in a volume filled with brain-toppling towers of numbers, these are among the most startling. The Utah genealogists aim to create a community in death, in the same way as a village churchyard did, but theirs – the Church of Latter Day Saints – is global. The Mormons perform retrospective baptisms, a practice that has caused protests when, for example, Jewish figures like Anne Frank have been made ‘saints’. Nevertheless necronominalism is the order of existence here in the West, and our own magical thinking underlies the public chanting of the names of the victims of Aids or of 9/11 – the ritual strives both to exorcise the horror and to summon the vanished back to memory.
Laqueur’s research for this book over the last decade couldn’t take stock of the effect of social media on the culture of mortal remains, but he clearly anticipates the consequences of the unprecedented access to information that they offer. On the one hand, bureaucratic data-gathering and censuses act as forms of surveillance and control, abolishing privacy and individual rights, and on the other they offer unforeseen opportunities for pursuing personal lines of inquiry and crafting subjectivities and inclinations (a recent women’s questionnaire I was sent included 26 different genders with a blank box if none of the above applied). At the same time a story can now move so fast and become so widely accepted that it sweeps away hints and traces of alternatives, and it’s then tough to redraft and dislodge. Reckoning with these standardised fables convenues (as Voltaire quipped about history in general) sets a compelling task for thinkers and writers in all fields, not only history. Unearthing hitherto unheard voices and silenced stories has become a central stratagem of the living in relation to the hubbub of the endless data archive we live with. ‘Not just some, but all writing of the narrative kind, and perhaps all writing, is motivated, deep down, by a fear of and fascination with mortality – by a desire to make the risky trip to the Underworld, and to bring something or someone back from the dead,’ Margaret Atwood suggested in her fine Empson Lectures. The aim is often redress, redress achieved through imaginative acts of memory, through exhuming the dead, as in Zong!, a remarkable prose-poem written in 2008 by M. NourbeSe Philip, which takes off from the notorious incident in 1781 when the captain of the slave ship Zong threw 133 slaves overboard and then claimed insurance on their loss. Using only the words of the surviving legal report, Philip cuts them up, scrambles and rearticulates them to produce a chorale of voices, rising on the page as if from the sea, while along the bottom of the page, she runs a litany of names from the regions in Africa they might have come from – and to which she, as a Trinidadian-Canadian, also traces her descent. Zong! deliberately turns a dry judicial decision into an anthem, a multi-vocal lament and act of mourning and resistance to historical amnesia on behalf of a group of the utterly disappeared. She has performed it solo and also with a chorus, and the recitation takes on the character of a ceremony, a conjuration – again, a secularisation of an ancient mode of memorialising, and a very contemporary way of defining a life by the momentousness of its end.
In accordance with the fluid subjectivities offered by technology, the contemporary desire to be reunited with the body of the loved one has moved into a more personal, subjective key: the urn or small casket in which what’s left might be placed is often taken home for the family to hold private, innovatory rituals – carrying them back to a country the dead left a long time ago, or scattering the ashes in a favourite spot – Laqueur mentions a group of friends choosing a tree they liked to pee against on camping trips. He is concerned with these continuities and innovations.
Bespoke funeral rites are increasingly available: Walt Disney was an early subject of deep freezing for eternity, a modern form of pharaonic dream; in 1996, two years after he died, the embalmed body of the artist Ed Kienholz, was provided with a dollar, a bottle of red wine, a pack of cards and the ashes of his dog, set up at the wheel of his vintage Packard, and then allowed to drift and fall into the grave to the sound of bagpipes. More soberingly, Laqueur’s narrative also illuminates how and why the distressing struggle over the dying baby Charlie Gard was so acute. In respect to the dead and dying, personal feelings have been prevailing ever more strongly over institutional bodies’ authority; social media, with some members of the press clamouring support, join forces to claim rights over the bodies of loved ones.
The book comes to its close with open-ended reflections on the new difficulties, such as the question of ‘the right to die’, and speculation about the protracted business of dying in the future. The past is prologue, and Laqueur’s line of argument promises that increasing private pressure will determine the fate of mortal remains. In her tightly coiled new novel, Home Fire, Kamila Shamsie reimagines Antigone in relation to jihadism today.[Bloomsbury, 272 pp., £16.99, August, 978 1 4088 8677 9.] If Creon had any support in the past, her dramatic reworking convinces us that, even in these extreme circumstances, twitter storms could fall upon him from every side; the call of the dead on the living for honour to be paid to the body, the seemingly indissoluble union of personhood and body in a supposed secular age, and the privatisation of social structures that used to help contain the passions of love and grief and desire mean that Antigone is more than ever a heroine of our time.
The Religious Observance of Ramadan and Prosocial Behavior
The Religious Observance of Ramadan and Prosocial Behavior. Ernan
Haruvy, Christos Ioannou and Farnoush Golshirazi. Economic Inquiry,
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ecin.12480/abstract
Abstract: We investigate experimentally the impact on prosocial behavior of the religious observance of Ramadan. Our sample consists of male factory workers in a manufacturing facility in a Muslim country. In our between-subjects' design, each worker is asked to allocate an amount of money between himself and a stranger. Specifically, we examine behavior of observants and nonobservants before and after the daily break of the Ramadan fast. We also examine behavior outside of Ramadan, where we treat alimentary abstention as akin to a long fasting period. We hypothesize and confirm that ***outside Ramadan, decision makers who abstain from any alimentary intake transfer less money to recipients relative to decision makers who do not abstain. Strikingly, this effect is reversed during the month of Ramadan. Specifically, observant workers who are in the midst of their Ramadan fast are far more generous to recipients than workers who have had their evening meal. Interestingly, observant and nonobservant workers after the daily break of the Ramadan fast and workers outside Ramadan that consumed aliments make statistically similar transfers***. Our findings suggest that it is the interaction between alimentary abstention and religious observance that amplifies prosocial behavior during Ramadan, where fasting is part of the ritual.
Check also: Spiritual Disciplines and Virtue Formation: Examining the Effects of Intercessory Prayer, Moral Intuitions, and Theological Orientation on Generous Behavior. Greenway, Tyler S., Ph.D., FULLER THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY, SCHOOL OF PSYCHOLOGY, 2017, 160 pages; 10286232. gradworks.umi.com/10/28/10286232.html
Abstract: We investigate experimentally the impact on prosocial behavior of the religious observance of Ramadan. Our sample consists of male factory workers in a manufacturing facility in a Muslim country. In our between-subjects' design, each worker is asked to allocate an amount of money between himself and a stranger. Specifically, we examine behavior of observants and nonobservants before and after the daily break of the Ramadan fast. We also examine behavior outside of Ramadan, where we treat alimentary abstention as akin to a long fasting period. We hypothesize and confirm that ***outside Ramadan, decision makers who abstain from any alimentary intake transfer less money to recipients relative to decision makers who do not abstain. Strikingly, this effect is reversed during the month of Ramadan. Specifically, observant workers who are in the midst of their Ramadan fast are far more generous to recipients than workers who have had their evening meal. Interestingly, observant and nonobservant workers after the daily break of the Ramadan fast and workers outside Ramadan that consumed aliments make statistically similar transfers***. Our findings suggest that it is the interaction between alimentary abstention and religious observance that amplifies prosocial behavior during Ramadan, where fasting is part of the ritual.
Check also: Spiritual Disciplines and Virtue Formation: Examining the Effects of Intercessory Prayer, Moral Intuitions, and Theological Orientation on Generous Behavior. Greenway, Tyler S., Ph.D., FULLER THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY, SCHOOL OF PSYCHOLOGY, 2017, 160 pages; 10286232. gradworks.umi.com/10/28/10286232.html
Something to celebrate (or not): The differing impact of promotion to manager on the job satisfaction of women and men
Something to celebrate (or not): The differing impact of promotion to manager on the job satisfaction of women and men. Daniela Lup. Work, Employment and Society, https://doi.org/10.1177/0950017017713932
Abstract: The literatures on gender status stereotyping and the ‘glass-ceiling’ have shown that women managers have more difficult job experiences than men, but whether these experiences result in lower job satisfaction is still an open question. Using fixed-effects models in a longitudinal national sample, this study examines differences in job satisfaction between women and men promoted into lower and higher-level management, after controlling for key determinants of job satisfaction. Results indicate that ***promotions to management are accompanied by an increase in job satisfaction for men but not for women, and that the differing effect lasts beyond the promotion year. Moreover, following promotion, the job satisfaction of women promoted to higher-level management even starts declining. The type of promotion (internal or lateral) does not modify this effect***. By clarifying the relationship between gender, promotion to managerial position and job satisfaction, the study contributes to the literature on the gender gap in managerial representation.
Abstract: The literatures on gender status stereotyping and the ‘glass-ceiling’ have shown that women managers have more difficult job experiences than men, but whether these experiences result in lower job satisfaction is still an open question. Using fixed-effects models in a longitudinal national sample, this study examines differences in job satisfaction between women and men promoted into lower and higher-level management, after controlling for key determinants of job satisfaction. Results indicate that ***promotions to management are accompanied by an increase in job satisfaction for men but not for women, and that the differing effect lasts beyond the promotion year. Moreover, following promotion, the job satisfaction of women promoted to higher-level management even starts declining. The type of promotion (internal or lateral) does not modify this effect***. By clarifying the relationship between gender, promotion to managerial position and job satisfaction, the study contributes to the literature on the gender gap in managerial representation.
Friday, August 25, 2017
Yawning Detection Sensitivity and Yawning Contagion
Yawning Detection Sensitivity and Yawning Contagion. Meingold H. M. Chan, Chia-Huei Tseng. i-Perception, Volume: 8 issue: 4, https://doi.org/10.1177/2041669517726797
Abstract: Contagious yawning—the urge to yawn when thinking about, listening to, or viewing yawning—is a well-documented phenomenon in humans and animals. The reduced yawn contagion observed in the autistic population suggested that it might be empathy related; however, it is unknown whether such a connection applies to nonclinical populations. We examined influences from both empathy (i.e., autistic traits) and nonempathy factors (i.e., individuals’ perceptual detection sensitivity to yawning, happy, and angry faces) on 41 nonclinical adults. We induced contagious yawning with a 5-minute video and 20 yawning photo stimuli. In addition, we measured participants’ autistic traits (with the autism-spectrum quotient questionnaire), eye gaze patterns, and their perceptual thresholds to detect yawning and emotion in human face photos. We found two factors associated with yawning contagion: (a) those more sensitive to detect yawning, but not other emotional expressions, displayed more contagious yawning than those less sensitive to yawning expressions, and (b) female participants exhibited significantly more contagious yawning than male participants. We did not find an association between autistic trait and contagious yawning. Our study offers a working hypothesis for future studies, in that perceptual encoding of yawning interacts with susceptibility to contagious yawning.
Abstract: Contagious yawning—the urge to yawn when thinking about, listening to, or viewing yawning—is a well-documented phenomenon in humans and animals. The reduced yawn contagion observed in the autistic population suggested that it might be empathy related; however, it is unknown whether such a connection applies to nonclinical populations. We examined influences from both empathy (i.e., autistic traits) and nonempathy factors (i.e., individuals’ perceptual detection sensitivity to yawning, happy, and angry faces) on 41 nonclinical adults. We induced contagious yawning with a 5-minute video and 20 yawning photo stimuli. In addition, we measured participants’ autistic traits (with the autism-spectrum quotient questionnaire), eye gaze patterns, and their perceptual thresholds to detect yawning and emotion in human face photos. We found two factors associated with yawning contagion: (a) those more sensitive to detect yawning, but not other emotional expressions, displayed more contagious yawning than those less sensitive to yawning expressions, and (b) female participants exhibited significantly more contagious yawning than male participants. We did not find an association between autistic trait and contagious yawning. Our study offers a working hypothesis for future studies, in that perceptual encoding of yawning interacts with susceptibility to contagious yawning.
Fertile Women Discount the Future: Conception Risk and Impulsivity Are Independently Associated with Financial Decisions
Fertile Women Discount the Future: Conception Risk and Impulsivity Are Independently Associated with Financial Decisions. Margery Lucas and Elissa Koff. Evolutionary Psychological Science, September 2017, Volume 3, Pages 261–269, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40806-017-0094-8
Abstract: According to the ovulatory shift hypothesis, women’s behavior near ovulation changes in ways that will enhance mating opportunities. In this study, the relationship between the ovulatory cycle and financial decision-making was investigated. We hypothesized that fertile women, compared to non-fertile women, would exhibit steeper discounting in a monetary choice task, i.e., they would prefer smaller, sooner rewards over larger, later ones, in order to secure resources that could be used for mating purposes. One hundred college-aged women who were normally ovulating and not on hormonal contraceptives completed a monetary choice task along with measures of three forms of impulsivity: nonplanning, motor, and financial. Conception risk was assessed in two ways, by discrete cycle phase windows and by a continuous measure. Results indicated that both fertility and financial impulsivity predicted future discounting. Neither nonplanning nor motor impulsivity influenced discounting. There was no interaction between impulsivity measures and conception risk, suggesting that fertility and impulsivity have independent effects on future discounting. The findings are consistent with the ovulatory shift hypothesis in showing that women’s economic behavior, particularly their preferences for acquiring resources now rather than later, is related to their fertility status. This behavior might be adaptive in that it could help women to gain resources that could enhance their appearance in the service of attracting potential mates or deterring rivals.
Keywords: Ovulatory cycle, Fertility, Ovulatory shift hypothesis, Impulsivity, Future discounting, Financial decision making
Abstract: According to the ovulatory shift hypothesis, women’s behavior near ovulation changes in ways that will enhance mating opportunities. In this study, the relationship between the ovulatory cycle and financial decision-making was investigated. We hypothesized that fertile women, compared to non-fertile women, would exhibit steeper discounting in a monetary choice task, i.e., they would prefer smaller, sooner rewards over larger, later ones, in order to secure resources that could be used for mating purposes. One hundred college-aged women who were normally ovulating and not on hormonal contraceptives completed a monetary choice task along with measures of three forms of impulsivity: nonplanning, motor, and financial. Conception risk was assessed in two ways, by discrete cycle phase windows and by a continuous measure. Results indicated that both fertility and financial impulsivity predicted future discounting. Neither nonplanning nor motor impulsivity influenced discounting. There was no interaction between impulsivity measures and conception risk, suggesting that fertility and impulsivity have independent effects on future discounting. The findings are consistent with the ovulatory shift hypothesis in showing that women’s economic behavior, particularly their preferences for acquiring resources now rather than later, is related to their fertility status. This behavior might be adaptive in that it could help women to gain resources that could enhance their appearance in the service of attracting potential mates or deterring rivals.
Keywords: Ovulatory cycle, Fertility, Ovulatory shift hypothesis, Impulsivity, Future discounting, Financial decision making
The efficiency of local government: The role of privatization and public sector unions
The efficiency of local government: The role of privatization and public sector unions. Rhiannon Jerch, Matthew E.Kahn and Shanjun Li. Journal of Public Economics, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpubeco.2017.08.003
Abstract: Local governments spend roughly $1.6 trillion per year to provide a variety of public services ranging from police and fire protection to public schools and public transit. However, we know little about public sector's productivity in delivering key services. Public bus service represents a standardized output for benchmarking the cost of local government service provision. Among the top twenty largest cities, there exists significant dispersion in the operating cost per bus mile with the highest being more than three times as high as the lowest. Using a regression discontinuity design, we estimate the cost savings from privatization and explore the political economy of why privatization rates are lower in high cost unionized areas. Our analysis suggests that fully privatizing all bus transit would generate cost savings of approximately $5.7 billion, or 30% of total U.S. bus transit operating expenses. The corresponding increased use of public transit from this cost reduction would lead to a gain in social welfare of $524 million, at minimum, and at least 26,000 additional transit jobs.
My comment: Our natural egotistic impulses makes transportation employees extract rents from the rest of the population for having more earnings. The future that the authors promote means more employment and bigger general welfare, but the new jobs would be payed much less than current entrenched, heavily unionized employees, so they will resist and delay as much as possible, maybe decades, any privatization of public transportation. This is they way we are.
Abstract: Local governments spend roughly $1.6 trillion per year to provide a variety of public services ranging from police and fire protection to public schools and public transit. However, we know little about public sector's productivity in delivering key services. Public bus service represents a standardized output for benchmarking the cost of local government service provision. Among the top twenty largest cities, there exists significant dispersion in the operating cost per bus mile with the highest being more than three times as high as the lowest. Using a regression discontinuity design, we estimate the cost savings from privatization and explore the political economy of why privatization rates are lower in high cost unionized areas. Our analysis suggests that fully privatizing all bus transit would generate cost savings of approximately $5.7 billion, or 30% of total U.S. bus transit operating expenses. The corresponding increased use of public transit from this cost reduction would lead to a gain in social welfare of $524 million, at minimum, and at least 26,000 additional transit jobs.
My comment: Our natural egotistic impulses makes transportation employees extract rents from the rest of the population for having more earnings. The future that the authors promote means more employment and bigger general welfare, but the new jobs would be payed much less than current entrenched, heavily unionized employees, so they will resist and delay as much as possible, maybe decades, any privatization of public transportation. This is they way we are.
Thursday, August 24, 2017
Beyond Black and White: Suspension Disparities for Hispanic, Asian, and White Youth
Beyond Black and White: Suspension Disparities for Hispanic, Asian, and White Youth. Mark Alden Morgan & John Paul Wright. Criminal Justice Review, https://doi.org/10.1177/0734016817721293
Abstract: Studies have consistently found a significant gap between Black and White students in various forms of school discipline. Few studies, however, have examined disciplinary differences between other racial and ethnic groups. Focusing on out-of-school suspensions, a punishment closely linked to the “school-to-prison pipeline,” we investigate the disparities between Hispanic, Asian, and White youth. Data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class are used to control for contemporary socioeconomic variables, the context of the school environment, and the parent-reported behavior of the student. Through a series of logistic regression models, we found that White students were significantly more likely to be suspended than were Hispanics or Asians. However, while the disparity between Hispanics and Whites was eliminated after controlling for student misbehavior, the gap persisted between Asians and Whites. These results question the contention that systemic racial discrimination is a leading contributor to group differences in school discipline. Moreover, we add to a limited but growing literature showing Asian students are significantly less likely to experience school punishments including suspension.
Abstract: Studies have consistently found a significant gap between Black and White students in various forms of school discipline. Few studies, however, have examined disciplinary differences between other racial and ethnic groups. Focusing on out-of-school suspensions, a punishment closely linked to the “school-to-prison pipeline,” we investigate the disparities between Hispanic, Asian, and White youth. Data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class are used to control for contemporary socioeconomic variables, the context of the school environment, and the parent-reported behavior of the student. Through a series of logistic regression models, we found that White students were significantly more likely to be suspended than were Hispanics or Asians. However, while the disparity between Hispanics and Whites was eliminated after controlling for student misbehavior, the gap persisted between Asians and Whites. These results question the contention that systemic racial discrimination is a leading contributor to group differences in school discipline. Moreover, we add to a limited but growing literature showing Asian students are significantly less likely to experience school punishments including suspension.
In God we trust? Neural measures reveal lower social conformity among non-religious individuals
In God we trust? Neural measures reveal lower social conformity among non-religious individuals. Ravi Thiruchselvam et al. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, June 2016, Pages 956-964, https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsx023
Abstract: Even in predominantly religious societies, there are substantial individual differences in religious commitment. Why is this? One possibility is that differences in social conformity (i.e. the tendency to think and behave as others do) underlie inclination towards religiosity. However, the link between religiosity and conformity has not yet been directly examined. In this study, we tested the notion that non-religious individuals show dampened social conformity, using both self-reported and neural (EEG-based ERPs) measures of sensitivity to others’ influence. Non-religious vs religious undergraduate subjects completed an experimental task that assessed levels of conformity in a domain unrelated to religion (i.e. in judgments of facial attractiveness). Findings showed that, although both groups yielded to conformity pressures at the self-report level, non-religious individuals did not yield to such pressures in their neural responses. These findings highlight a novel link between religiosity and social conformity, and hold implications for prominent theories about the psychological functions of religion.
Abstract: Even in predominantly religious societies, there are substantial individual differences in religious commitment. Why is this? One possibility is that differences in social conformity (i.e. the tendency to think and behave as others do) underlie inclination towards religiosity. However, the link between religiosity and conformity has not yet been directly examined. In this study, we tested the notion that non-religious individuals show dampened social conformity, using both self-reported and neural (EEG-based ERPs) measures of sensitivity to others’ influence. Non-religious vs religious undergraduate subjects completed an experimental task that assessed levels of conformity in a domain unrelated to religion (i.e. in judgments of facial attractiveness). Findings showed that, although both groups yielded to conformity pressures at the self-report level, non-religious individuals did not yield to such pressures in their neural responses. These findings highlight a novel link between religiosity and social conformity, and hold implications for prominent theories about the psychological functions of religion.
The prevalence of discrimination across racial groups in contemporary America: Results from a nationally representative sample of adults
The prevalence of discrimination across racial groups in contemporary America: Results from a nationally representative sample of adults. Brian B. Boutwell et al. PLoS One, August 24, 2017, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0183356
Abstract: A large body of social science research is devoted to understanding the causes and correlates of discrimination. Comparatively less effort has been aimed at providing a general prevalence estimate of discrimination using a nationally representative sample. The current study is intended to offer such an estimate using a large sample of American respondents (N = 14,793) while also exploring perceptions regarding why respondents felt they were discriminated against. The results provide a broad estimate of self-reported discrimination experiences—an event that was only reported by about one-quarter of all sample members—across racial and ethnic categories.
Abstract: A large body of social science research is devoted to understanding the causes and correlates of discrimination. Comparatively less effort has been aimed at providing a general prevalence estimate of discrimination using a nationally representative sample. The current study is intended to offer such an estimate using a large sample of American respondents (N = 14,793) while also exploring perceptions regarding why respondents felt they were discriminated against. The results provide a broad estimate of self-reported discrimination experiences—an event that was only reported by about one-quarter of all sample members—across racial and ethnic categories.
Parents are asking for children who are able to drink socially, for business purposes
in China some parents are asking for children who are able to drink socially, for business purposes, and thus trying to avoid some genes that make it difficult to process alcohol > the report in Nature: China’s embrace of embryo selection raises thorny questions --- Fertility centres are making a massive push to increase preimplantation genetic diagnosis in a bid to eradicate certain diseases.
By David Cyranoski. Aug 16 2017. http://www.nature.com/news/china-s-embrace-of-embryo-selection-raises-thorny-questions-1.22468
By David Cyranoski. Aug 16 2017. http://www.nature.com/news/china-s-embrace-of-embryo-selection-raises-thorny-questions-1.22468
Breaking Magic: Foreign Language Suppresses Superstition
Breaking Magic: Foreign Language Suppresses Superstition. Constantinos Hadjichristidis, Janet Geipel & Luca Surian. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, Aug 2017, Pages 1-36, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17470218.2017.1371780
Abstract: In three studies we found that reading information in a foreign language can suppress common superstitious beliefs. Participants read scenarios either in their native or a foreign language. In each scenario, participants were asked to imagine performing an action (e.g., submitting a job application) under a superstitious circumstance (e.g., broken mirror; four-leaf clover) and to rate how they would feel. Overall, foreign language prompted less negative feelings towards bad-luck scenarios, less positive feelings towards good-luck scenarios, while it exerted no influence on non-superstitious, control scenarios. We attribute these findings to language-dependent memory. Superstitious beliefs are typically acquired and used in contexts involving the native language. As a result, the native language evokes them more forcefully than a foreign language.
Keywords: superstition, bilingualism, emotions, language, the foreign language effect
Abstract: In three studies we found that reading information in a foreign language can suppress common superstitious beliefs. Participants read scenarios either in their native or a foreign language. In each scenario, participants were asked to imagine performing an action (e.g., submitting a job application) under a superstitious circumstance (e.g., broken mirror; four-leaf clover) and to rate how they would feel. Overall, foreign language prompted less negative feelings towards bad-luck scenarios, less positive feelings towards good-luck scenarios, while it exerted no influence on non-superstitious, control scenarios. We attribute these findings to language-dependent memory. Superstitious beliefs are typically acquired and used in contexts involving the native language. As a result, the native language evokes them more forcefully than a foreign language.
Keywords: superstition, bilingualism, emotions, language, the foreign language effect
The Impact of Abnormally Shaped Vegetables on Consumers’ Risk Perception
The Impact of Abnormally Shaped Vegetables on Consumers’ Risk Perception. Natascha Loebnitz and Klaus G. Grunert. Food Quality and Preference, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foodqual.2017.08.004
Highlights
• We examine vegetable shape abnormality on consumers’ risk perception.
• Vegetable shape abnormality affect risk perception through food’s perceived naturalness.
• Abnormally shaped vegetables are seen as unnatural which in turn increases risk perception.
• Knowledge types moderate the vegetable shape – risk perception relationship.
Abstract: Genetically-modified (GM) food evokes high levels of fear and negative associations among consumers. This study predicts that people may associate naturally occurring vegetable shape-abnormalities with GM food, which increases their risk perception. With an experimental design in two studies, this research investigates the impact of abnormally-shaped vegetables on participants’ risk perceptions related to vegetable items that vary in their degree of association with GM technology. The results reveal that knowledge can moderate the vegetable shape-abnormality–risk relationship, depending on its objectivity or subjectivity.
Keywords: Abnormally-shaped vegetables; Risk perception; Knowledge types; Perceived naturalness; GM food
My comment: "Consumers perceive abnormally-shaped vegetables as more risky [...] and paradoxically, they associate natural vegetable shape-abnormalities with GM, despite having no other information available" & "increasing consumers' objective knowledge about food production does not prevent risk perceptions."
Highlights
• We examine vegetable shape abnormality on consumers’ risk perception.
• Vegetable shape abnormality affect risk perception through food’s perceived naturalness.
• Abnormally shaped vegetables are seen as unnatural which in turn increases risk perception.
• Knowledge types moderate the vegetable shape – risk perception relationship.
Abstract: Genetically-modified (GM) food evokes high levels of fear and negative associations among consumers. This study predicts that people may associate naturally occurring vegetable shape-abnormalities with GM food, which increases their risk perception. With an experimental design in two studies, this research investigates the impact of abnormally-shaped vegetables on participants’ risk perceptions related to vegetable items that vary in their degree of association with GM technology. The results reveal that knowledge can moderate the vegetable shape-abnormality–risk relationship, depending on its objectivity or subjectivity.
Keywords: Abnormally-shaped vegetables; Risk perception; Knowledge types; Perceived naturalness; GM food
My comment: "Consumers perceive abnormally-shaped vegetables as more risky [...] and paradoxically, they associate natural vegetable shape-abnormalities with GM, despite having no other information available" & "increasing consumers' objective knowledge about food production does not prevent risk perceptions."
Gender equality, value violations, and prejudice toward Muslims
Gender equality, value violations, and prejudice toward Muslims. Aaron Moss et al. Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, https://doi.org/10.1177/1368430217716751
Abstract: Why are people prejudiced toward Muslims? In this research, we used a value violation framework to predict that when people believe Muslims value gender equality less than reference groups, it creates a value violation that leads to prejudice. In Study 1, people believed that Muslims value gender equality less than Christians, and the more people believed that Muslims do not value gender equality, the more they reported prejudice toward Muslims. In Study 2, we manipulated perceptions of how much Muslims value gender equality by giving people evidence that Muslims either do or do not support women’s rights. Afterward, we measured people’s prejudice toward Muslims and desire for social distance. Telling people that Muslims value gender equality reduced both prejudice and the desire for social distance. These effects occurred by increasing people’s beliefs that they share values with Muslims, highlighting the importance of values as a source of prejudice.
Abstract: Why are people prejudiced toward Muslims? In this research, we used a value violation framework to predict that when people believe Muslims value gender equality less than reference groups, it creates a value violation that leads to prejudice. In Study 1, people believed that Muslims value gender equality less than Christians, and the more people believed that Muslims do not value gender equality, the more they reported prejudice toward Muslims. In Study 2, we manipulated perceptions of how much Muslims value gender equality by giving people evidence that Muslims either do or do not support women’s rights. Afterward, we measured people’s prejudice toward Muslims and desire for social distance. Telling people that Muslims value gender equality reduced both prejudice and the desire for social distance. These effects occurred by increasing people’s beliefs that they share values with Muslims, highlighting the importance of values as a source of prejudice.
Do post-reproductive aged females promote maternal health? Preliminary evidence from historical populations
Do post-reproductive aged females promote maternal health? Preliminary evidence from historical populations. Alison Gemmill and Ralph Catalano. Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health, eox012, https://doi.org/10.1093/emph/eox012
Abstract
Background and Objectives: Much literature argues that natural selection conserved menopause and longevity in women because those who stopped childbearing helped bolster daughters’ fertility and reduce infant mortality among grandchildren. Whether the presence of grandmothers ever improved fitness sufficiently to affect longevity via natural selection remains controversial and difficult to test. The argument underlying the grandmother and associated alloparenting literature, however, leads us to the novel and testable prediction that the presence of older women in historical societies could have affected population health by reducing lethality associated with childbearing.
Methodology: Using historical life table data from four societies (Denmark, England and Wales, France, and Sweden), we test the hypothesis that death rates among women initiating childbearing declined when the societies in which they were embedded included unexpectedly high frequencies of older women. We use time series analysis to measure the extent to which the observed likelihood of death among women aged 20-24 differs from statistically expected values when the number of older women grows or declines.
Results: In three of the four countries examined, we find an inverse relationship between the frequency of post-reproductive females in the population and odds of mortality among females at the peak of childbearing initiation.
Conclusions and implications: Results suggest that the presence of older women in a population may enhance population health by reducing mortality among women who face high risk of maternal death, although additional research is needed to determine if this relationship is causal.
Abstract
Background and Objectives: Much literature argues that natural selection conserved menopause and longevity in women because those who stopped childbearing helped bolster daughters’ fertility and reduce infant mortality among grandchildren. Whether the presence of grandmothers ever improved fitness sufficiently to affect longevity via natural selection remains controversial and difficult to test. The argument underlying the grandmother and associated alloparenting literature, however, leads us to the novel and testable prediction that the presence of older women in historical societies could have affected population health by reducing lethality associated with childbearing.
Methodology: Using historical life table data from four societies (Denmark, England and Wales, France, and Sweden), we test the hypothesis that death rates among women initiating childbearing declined when the societies in which they were embedded included unexpectedly high frequencies of older women. We use time series analysis to measure the extent to which the observed likelihood of death among women aged 20-24 differs from statistically expected values when the number of older women grows or declines.
Results: In three of the four countries examined, we find an inverse relationship between the frequency of post-reproductive females in the population and odds of mortality among females at the peak of childbearing initiation.
Conclusions and implications: Results suggest that the presence of older women in a population may enhance population health by reducing mortality among women who face high risk of maternal death, although additional research is needed to determine if this relationship is causal.
The Future of Secularism: A Biologically Informed Theory Supplemented with Cross-Cultural Evidence
The Future of Secularism: A Biologically Informed Theory Supplemented with Cross-Cultural Evidence. Lee Ellis et al. Evolutionary Psychological Science, September 2017, Volume 3, Issue 3, pp 224–242, https://doi.org/10.1007/s40806-017-0090-z
Abstract: For over a century, social scientists have predicted declines in religious beliefs and their replacement with more scientific/naturalistic outlooks, a prediction known as the secularization hypothesis. However, skepticism surrounding this hypothesis has been expressed by some researchers in recent decades. After reviewing the pertinent evidence and arguments, we examined some aspects of the secularization hypothesis from what is termed a biologically informed perspective. Based on large samples of college students in Malaysia and the USA, religiosity, religious affiliation, and parental fertility were measured using self-reports. Three religiosity indicators were factor analyzed, resulting in an index for religiosity. Results reveal that average parental fertility varied considerably according to religious groups, with Muslims being the most religious and the most fertile and Jews and Buddhists being the least. Within most religious groupings, religiosity was positively associated with parental fertility. While cross-sectional in nature, ***when our results are combined with evidence that both religiosity and fertility are substantially heritable traits, findings are consistent with view that earlier trends toward secularization (due to science education surrounding advancements in science) are currently being counter-balanced by genetic and reproductive forces. We also propose that the inverse association between intelligence and religiosity, and the inverse correlation between intelligence and fertility lead to predictions of a decline in secularism in the foreseeable future. A contra-secularization hypothesis is proposed and defended in the discussion. It states that secularism is likely to undergo a decline throughout the remainder of the twenty-first century, including Europe and other industrial societies***.
Keywords: Religions, Religiosity, Secularization, Parental fertility, Cross-cultural
My comment: Very interesting article. I believed, from a long time, that the people needs religion. A different thing is what will happen to some strands, like those in Evangelical Christianity that support creationism instead of evolutionism. Maybe these groups will diminish. Or maybe all traditional religions will suffer a decrease in influence, althouth the total sum of religions will increase in the XXI century...
Abstract: For over a century, social scientists have predicted declines in religious beliefs and their replacement with more scientific/naturalistic outlooks, a prediction known as the secularization hypothesis. However, skepticism surrounding this hypothesis has been expressed by some researchers in recent decades. After reviewing the pertinent evidence and arguments, we examined some aspects of the secularization hypothesis from what is termed a biologically informed perspective. Based on large samples of college students in Malaysia and the USA, religiosity, religious affiliation, and parental fertility were measured using self-reports. Three religiosity indicators were factor analyzed, resulting in an index for religiosity. Results reveal that average parental fertility varied considerably according to religious groups, with Muslims being the most religious and the most fertile and Jews and Buddhists being the least. Within most religious groupings, religiosity was positively associated with parental fertility. While cross-sectional in nature, ***when our results are combined with evidence that both religiosity and fertility are substantially heritable traits, findings are consistent with view that earlier trends toward secularization (due to science education surrounding advancements in science) are currently being counter-balanced by genetic and reproductive forces. We also propose that the inverse association between intelligence and religiosity, and the inverse correlation between intelligence and fertility lead to predictions of a decline in secularism in the foreseeable future. A contra-secularization hypothesis is proposed and defended in the discussion. It states that secularism is likely to undergo a decline throughout the remainder of the twenty-first century, including Europe and other industrial societies***.
Keywords: Religions, Religiosity, Secularization, Parental fertility, Cross-cultural
My comment: Very interesting article. I believed, from a long time, that the people needs religion. A different thing is what will happen to some strands, like those in Evangelical Christianity that support creationism instead of evolutionism. Maybe these groups will diminish. Or maybe all traditional religions will suffer a decrease in influence, althouth the total sum of religions will increase in the XXI century...
Wednesday, August 23, 2017
High rates (40%) of smokers enrolled in smoking cessation trials lie about their abstinence
Scheuermann, T. S., Richter, K. P., Rigotti, N. A., Cummins, S. E., Harrington, K. F., Sherman, S. E., Zhu, S.-H., Tindle, H. A., Preacher, K. J., and the Consortium of Hospitals Advancing Research on Tobacco (CHART) (2017) Accuracy of self-reported smoking abstinence in clinical trials of hospital-initiated smoking interventions. Addiction, doi: 10.1111/add.13913
Abstract
Aims: To estimate the prevalence and predictors of failed biochemical verification of self-reported abstinence among participants enrolled in trials of hospital-initiated smoking cessation interventions.
Design: Comparison of characteristics between participants who verified and those who failed to verify self-reported abstinence.
Settings: Multi-site randomized clinical trials conducted between 2010 and 2014 in hospitals throughout the United States.
Participants: Recently hospitalized smokers who reported tobacco abstinence 6 months post-randomization and provided a saliva sample for verification purposes (n = 822).
Measurements: Outcomes were salivary cotinine-verified smoking abstinence at 10 and 15 ng/ml cut-points. Predictors and correlates included participant demographics and tobacco use; hospital diagnoses and treatment; and study characteristics collected via surveys and electronic medical records.
Findings: Usable samples were returned by 69.8% of the 1178 eligible trial participants who reported 7-day point prevalence abstinence. The proportion of participants verified as quit was 57.8% [95% confidence interval (CI) = 54.4, 61.2; 10 ng/ml cut-off] or 60.6% (95% CI = 57.2, 63.9; 15 ng/ml). Factors associated independently with verification at 10 ng/ml were education beyond high school education [odds ratio (OR) = 1.51; 95% CI = 1.07, 2.11], continuous abstinence since hospitalization (OR = 2.82; 95% CI = 2.02, 3.94), mailed versus in-person sample (OR = 3.20; 95% CI = 1.96, 5.21) and race. African American participants were less likely to verify abstinence than white participants (OR = 0.64; 95% CI = 0.44, 0.93). Findings were similar for verification at 15 ng/ml. Verification rates did not differ by treatment group.
Conclusions: In the United States, high rates (40%) of recently hospitalized smokers enrolled in smoking cessation trials fail biochemical verification of their self-reported abstinence.
My comment: As Dr House would say, everybody lies.
Abstract
Aims: To estimate the prevalence and predictors of failed biochemical verification of self-reported abstinence among participants enrolled in trials of hospital-initiated smoking cessation interventions.
Design: Comparison of characteristics between participants who verified and those who failed to verify self-reported abstinence.
Settings: Multi-site randomized clinical trials conducted between 2010 and 2014 in hospitals throughout the United States.
Participants: Recently hospitalized smokers who reported tobacco abstinence 6 months post-randomization and provided a saliva sample for verification purposes (n = 822).
Measurements: Outcomes were salivary cotinine-verified smoking abstinence at 10 and 15 ng/ml cut-points. Predictors and correlates included participant demographics and tobacco use; hospital diagnoses and treatment; and study characteristics collected via surveys and electronic medical records.
Findings: Usable samples were returned by 69.8% of the 1178 eligible trial participants who reported 7-day point prevalence abstinence. The proportion of participants verified as quit was 57.8% [95% confidence interval (CI) = 54.4, 61.2; 10 ng/ml cut-off] or 60.6% (95% CI = 57.2, 63.9; 15 ng/ml). Factors associated independently with verification at 10 ng/ml were education beyond high school education [odds ratio (OR) = 1.51; 95% CI = 1.07, 2.11], continuous abstinence since hospitalization (OR = 2.82; 95% CI = 2.02, 3.94), mailed versus in-person sample (OR = 3.20; 95% CI = 1.96, 5.21) and race. African American participants were less likely to verify abstinence than white participants (OR = 0.64; 95% CI = 0.44, 0.93). Findings were similar for verification at 15 ng/ml. Verification rates did not differ by treatment group.
Conclusions: In the United States, high rates (40%) of recently hospitalized smokers enrolled in smoking cessation trials fail biochemical verification of their self-reported abstinence.
My comment: As Dr House would say, everybody lies.
Being similar while judging right and wrong: The effects of personal and situational similarity on moral judgements
Pascal, E. (2017), Being similar while judging right and wrong: The effects of personal and situational similarity on moral judgements. Int J Psychol. doi:10.1002/ijop.12448
Abstract: This study investigated the effects of similarity with the transgressor and the victim on the perceived immorality of the transgression. Participants read two stories describing a person that cheated on their partner and a police officer that mistreated somebody. In the first story we manipulated participants' personal similarity to the transgressor and in the second their personal similarity to the victim. In each story, participants' past situational similarity to the target character was assessed according to their previous experiences of being in the same position. Results show that ***both personal and past situational similarity to the transgressor determine less severe moral judgements, while personal and past situational similarity with the victim have the opposite effect***. We also tested several potential mediators of these effects, derived from competing theoretical accounts of the influence of similarity on perceived responsibility. Empathy emerged as mediating most of the effects of similarity on moral judgements, except those induced by past situational similarity with the victim. The foreseen probability of being in a similar situation mediated only the effects of similarity to the transgressor, and not those of similarity to the victim. ***Overall, results highlight the complex mechanisms of the influences of similarity on moral judgements***.
Abstract: This study investigated the effects of similarity with the transgressor and the victim on the perceived immorality of the transgression. Participants read two stories describing a person that cheated on their partner and a police officer that mistreated somebody. In the first story we manipulated participants' personal similarity to the transgressor and in the second their personal similarity to the victim. In each story, participants' past situational similarity to the target character was assessed according to their previous experiences of being in the same position. Results show that ***both personal and past situational similarity to the transgressor determine less severe moral judgements, while personal and past situational similarity with the victim have the opposite effect***. We also tested several potential mediators of these effects, derived from competing theoretical accounts of the influence of similarity on perceived responsibility. Empathy emerged as mediating most of the effects of similarity on moral judgements, except those induced by past situational similarity with the victim. The foreseen probability of being in a similar situation mediated only the effects of similarity to the transgressor, and not those of similarity to the victim. ***Overall, results highlight the complex mechanisms of the influences of similarity on moral judgements***.
Freud: The Making of an Illusion, by Frederick Crews
Freud: The Making of an Illusion, by Frederick Crews
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1627797173/ref=rdr_ext_tmb
Extracts:
Source: https://twitter.com/DegenRolf
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1627797173/ref=rdr_ext_tmb
Extracts:
Source: https://twitter.com/DegenRolf
Tuesday, August 22, 2017
Religion, Repulsion, and Reaction Formation: Transforming Repellent Attractions and Repulsions
Religion, Repulsion, and Reaction Formation: Transforming Repellent Attractions and Repulsions. Dov Cohen, Emily Kim and Nathan Hudson. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28604017
Abstract: Protestants were more likely than non-Protestants to demonstrate phenomena consistent with the use of reaction formation. Lab experiments showed that when manipulations were designed to produce taboo attractions (to unconventional sexual practices), Protestants instead showed greater repulsion. When implicitly conditioned to produce taboo repulsions (to African Americans), Protestants instead showed greater attraction. Supportive evidence from other studies came from clinicians’ judgments, defense mechanism inventories, and a survey of respondent attitudes. Other work showed that Protestants who diminished and displaced threatening affect were more likely to sublimate this affect into creative activities; the present work showed that Protestants who do not or cannot diminish or displace such threatening affect instead reverse it. Traditional individual difference variables showed little ability to predict reaction formation, suggesting that the observed processes go beyond what we normally study when we talk about self-control.
Abstract: Protestants were more likely than non-Protestants to demonstrate phenomena consistent with the use of reaction formation. Lab experiments showed that when manipulations were designed to produce taboo attractions (to unconventional sexual practices), Protestants instead showed greater repulsion. When implicitly conditioned to produce taboo repulsions (to African Americans), Protestants instead showed greater attraction. Supportive evidence from other studies came from clinicians’ judgments, defense mechanism inventories, and a survey of respondent attitudes. Other work showed that Protestants who diminished and displaced threatening affect were more likely to sublimate this affect into creative activities; the present work showed that Protestants who do not or cannot diminish or displace such threatening affect instead reverse it. Traditional individual difference variables showed little ability to predict reaction formation, suggesting that the observed processes go beyond what we normally study when we talk about self-control.
Unintended Effects of Providing Risk Information About Drinking and Driving
The Unintended Effects of Providing Risk Information About Drinking and Driving. Mark Johnson and Catalina Kopetz. Health Psychology, Jul 20 2017. doi: 10.1037/hea0000526
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: Alcohol-impaired driving remains a serious public health concern despite the fact that drinking and driving risks are widely disseminated and well understood by the public. This research examines the motivational conditions under which providing risk information can exacerbate rather than decrease potential drinking drivers' willingness to drive while impaired.
METHOD: In a hypothetical drinking and driving scenario, 3 studies investigated participants' self-reported likelihood of drinking and driving as a function of (a) accessibility of information regarding risk associated with drinking and driving, (b) motivation to drive, and (c) need for cognitive closure (NFC).
RESULTS: Across the 3 studies, participants self-reported a higher likelihood of driving when exposed to high-risk information (vs. low-risk information) if they were high in NFC. Risk information did decrease self-reported likelihood of driving among low-NFC participants (Studies 1-3). Furthermore, this effect was exacerbated when the relevant motivation (to get home conveniently) was high (Study 3).
CONCLUSIONS: These findings have important implications for impaired-driving prevention efforts. They suggest that at least under some circumstances, risk information can have unintended negative effects on drinking and driving decisions. The results are consistent with the motivated cognition literature, which suggests that people process and use information in a manner that supports their most accessible and important motivation despite potentially negative consequences.
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: Alcohol-impaired driving remains a serious public health concern despite the fact that drinking and driving risks are widely disseminated and well understood by the public. This research examines the motivational conditions under which providing risk information can exacerbate rather than decrease potential drinking drivers' willingness to drive while impaired.
METHOD: In a hypothetical drinking and driving scenario, 3 studies investigated participants' self-reported likelihood of drinking and driving as a function of (a) accessibility of information regarding risk associated with drinking and driving, (b) motivation to drive, and (c) need for cognitive closure (NFC).
RESULTS: Across the 3 studies, participants self-reported a higher likelihood of driving when exposed to high-risk information (vs. low-risk information) if they were high in NFC. Risk information did decrease self-reported likelihood of driving among low-NFC participants (Studies 1-3). Furthermore, this effect was exacerbated when the relevant motivation (to get home conveniently) was high (Study 3).
CONCLUSIONS: These findings have important implications for impaired-driving prevention efforts. They suggest that at least under some circumstances, risk information can have unintended negative effects on drinking and driving decisions. The results are consistent with the motivated cognition literature, which suggests that people process and use information in a manner that supports their most accessible and important motivation despite potentially negative consequences.
Understatement of the year: People's ability to judge the veracity of their intuitions may be limited
Can People Judge the Veracity of Their Intuitions? Stefan Leach and Mario Weick. Social Psychological and Personality Science, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550617706732
Abstract: People differ in the belief that their intuitions produce good decision outcomes. In the present research, we sought to test the validity of these beliefs by comparing individuals' self-reports with measures of actual intuition performance in a standard implicit learning task, exposing participants to seemingly random letter strings (Studies 1a-b) and social media profile pictures (Study 2) that conformed to an underlying rule or grammar. ***A meta-analysis synthesising the present data (n = 400) and secondary data by Pretz, Totz, and Kaufman (2010) found that people's enduring beliefs in their intuitions were not reflective of actual performance in the implicit learning task. Meanwhile, task-specific confidence in intuition bore no sizable relation with implicit learning performance***, but the observed data favoured neither the Null hypothesis nor the Alternative hypothesis. Together, the present findings suggest that people's ability to judge the veracity of their intuitions may be limited.
Abstract: People differ in the belief that their intuitions produce good decision outcomes. In the present research, we sought to test the validity of these beliefs by comparing individuals' self-reports with measures of actual intuition performance in a standard implicit learning task, exposing participants to seemingly random letter strings (Studies 1a-b) and social media profile pictures (Study 2) that conformed to an underlying rule or grammar. ***A meta-analysis synthesising the present data (n = 400) and secondary data by Pretz, Totz, and Kaufman (2010) found that people's enduring beliefs in their intuitions were not reflective of actual performance in the implicit learning task. Meanwhile, task-specific confidence in intuition bore no sizable relation with implicit learning performance***, but the observed data favoured neither the Null hypothesis nor the Alternative hypothesis. Together, the present findings suggest that people's ability to judge the veracity of their intuitions may be limited.
Dress and sex -- A majority of girls demonstrated appearance rigidity at least once
Dress and sex: a review of empirical research involving human participants and published in refereed journals. Sharron J. Lennon et al. Fashion and Textiles, December 2017, 4:14, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s40691-017-0101-5
Abstract: Our research purpose was to assess research addressing relationships between dress and sex. Our review was focused on a 25 years span (i.e., 1990–2015) and on empirical research utilizing human participants published in refereed journals. Three main areas of research emerged: (1) dress used as cue to sexual information, (2) dress and sexual violence, and (3) dress, sex, and objectification. Our analyses revealed parents do invest their young children with sex-typed dress however sometimes children demand to wear such dress. Some women intentionally use dress to communicate sexual information but inferences about women who wear sexy dress can be misinterpreted and are sometimes negative. Observers link wearing sexy dress to violence including sexual coercion, sexual harassment, sexual assault, and unwelcome groping, touching, and grabbing. Certain items of sexy dress that reveal the body have been linked to self-objectification. The fit of the items may also contribute to the body revealing nature of clothing styles that elicit self-objectification. The use of sexual images of women and children has increased over time and viewing such images is also linked to self- and other-objectification. Suggestions are provided for future research.
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"Appearance rigidity involves insisting on wearing dress items that are closely tied to one sex or avoiding dress items linked to the opposite sex. Few boys demonstrated appearance rigidity, but a majority of girls demonstrated appearance rigidity at least once. Rigidity was linked to children who indicated it was important to them to be a girl or boy (measured using items adapted from adult identity measures). Repeating the study with 4 year old children from ethnically diverse backgrounds, incidents of appearance rigidity were even higher as over half of both the girls and boys demonstrated it."
Abstract: Our research purpose was to assess research addressing relationships between dress and sex. Our review was focused on a 25 years span (i.e., 1990–2015) and on empirical research utilizing human participants published in refereed journals. Three main areas of research emerged: (1) dress used as cue to sexual information, (2) dress and sexual violence, and (3) dress, sex, and objectification. Our analyses revealed parents do invest their young children with sex-typed dress however sometimes children demand to wear such dress. Some women intentionally use dress to communicate sexual information but inferences about women who wear sexy dress can be misinterpreted and are sometimes negative. Observers link wearing sexy dress to violence including sexual coercion, sexual harassment, sexual assault, and unwelcome groping, touching, and grabbing. Certain items of sexy dress that reveal the body have been linked to self-objectification. The fit of the items may also contribute to the body revealing nature of clothing styles that elicit self-objectification. The use of sexual images of women and children has increased over time and viewing such images is also linked to self- and other-objectification. Suggestions are provided for future research.
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"Appearance rigidity involves insisting on wearing dress items that are closely tied to one sex or avoiding dress items linked to the opposite sex. Few boys demonstrated appearance rigidity, but a majority of girls demonstrated appearance rigidity at least once. Rigidity was linked to children who indicated it was important to them to be a girl or boy (measured using items adapted from adult identity measures). Repeating the study with 4 year old children from ethnically diverse backgrounds, incidents of appearance rigidity were even higher as over half of both the girls and boys demonstrated it."
Connecting the Dots: Illusory Pattern Perception Predicts Belief in Conspiracies and the Supernatural
van Prooijen, J.-W., Douglas, K., and De Inocencio, C. (2017) Connecting the Dots: Illusory Pattern Perception Predicts Belief in Conspiracies and the Supernatural. Eur. J. Soc. Psychol., doi: 10.1002/ejsp.2331
Abstract: A common assumption is that belief in conspiracy theories and supernatural phenomena are grounded in illusory pattern perception. In the present research we systematically tested this assumption. Study 1 revealed that such irrational beliefs are related to perceiving patterns in randomly generated coin toss outcomes. In Study 2, pattern search instructions exerted an indirect effect on irrational beliefs through pattern perception. Study 3 revealed that perceiving patterns in chaotic but not in structured paintings predicted irrational beliefs. In Study 4, we found that agreement with texts supporting paranormal phenomena or conspiracy theories predicted pattern perception. In Study 5, we manipulated belief in a specific conspiracy theory. This manipulation influenced the extent to which people perceive patterns in world events, which in turn predicted unrelated irrational beliefs. We conclude that illusory pattern perception is a central cognitive mechanism accounting for conspiracy theories and supernatural beliefs.
Abstract: A common assumption is that belief in conspiracy theories and supernatural phenomena are grounded in illusory pattern perception. In the present research we systematically tested this assumption. Study 1 revealed that such irrational beliefs are related to perceiving patterns in randomly generated coin toss outcomes. In Study 2, pattern search instructions exerted an indirect effect on irrational beliefs through pattern perception. Study 3 revealed that perceiving patterns in chaotic but not in structured paintings predicted irrational beliefs. In Study 4, we found that agreement with texts supporting paranormal phenomena or conspiracy theories predicted pattern perception. In Study 5, we manipulated belief in a specific conspiracy theory. This manipulation influenced the extent to which people perceive patterns in world events, which in turn predicted unrelated irrational beliefs. We conclude that illusory pattern perception is a central cognitive mechanism accounting for conspiracy theories and supernatural beliefs.
Children acknowledge more negative self-conceptions when motivated to be truthful
Thomaes, S., Brummelman, E. and Sedikides, C. (2017), Why Most Children Think Well of Themselves. Child Dev. doi:10.1111/cdev.12937
Abstract: This research aimed to examine whether and why children hold favorable self-conceptions (total N = 882 Dutch children, ages 8–12). Surveys (Studies 1–2) showed that children report strongly favorable self-conceptions. For example, when describing themselves on an open-ended measure, children mainly provided positive self-conceptions—about four times more than neutral self-conceptions, and about 11 times more than negative self-conceptions. Experiments (Studies 3–4) demonstrated that children report favorable self-conceptions, in part, to live up to social norms idealizing such self-conceptions, and to avoid seeing or presenting themselves negatively. These findings advance understanding of the developing self-concept and its valence: In middle and late childhood, children's self-conceptions are robustly favorable and influenced by both external (social norms) and internal (self-motives) forces.
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"When encouraged to respond truthfully, children kept their self-protection motive in check, and acknowledged some of their liabilities or uncertainties" & "at least in childhood, such blindness [to their own faults] may be more motivated than real—children acknowledge more negative self-conceptions when motivated to be truthful."
Abstract: This research aimed to examine whether and why children hold favorable self-conceptions (total N = 882 Dutch children, ages 8–12). Surveys (Studies 1–2) showed that children report strongly favorable self-conceptions. For example, when describing themselves on an open-ended measure, children mainly provided positive self-conceptions—about four times more than neutral self-conceptions, and about 11 times more than negative self-conceptions. Experiments (Studies 3–4) demonstrated that children report favorable self-conceptions, in part, to live up to social norms idealizing such self-conceptions, and to avoid seeing or presenting themselves negatively. These findings advance understanding of the developing self-concept and its valence: In middle and late childhood, children's self-conceptions are robustly favorable and influenced by both external (social norms) and internal (self-motives) forces.
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"When encouraged to respond truthfully, children kept their self-protection motive in check, and acknowledged some of their liabilities or uncertainties" & "at least in childhood, such blindness [to their own faults] may be more motivated than real—children acknowledge more negative self-conceptions when motivated to be truthful."
Children Expect More Giving From Resource-Rich Than Resource-Poor Individuals
Ahl, R. E. and Dunham, Y. (2017), “Wealth Makes Many Friends”: Children Expect More Giving From Resource-Rich Than Resource-Poor Individuals. Child Dev. doi:10.1111/cdev.12922
Abstract: Young children show social preferences for resource-rich individuals, although few studies have explored the causes underlying such preferences. We evaluate the viability of one candidate cause: ***Children believe that resource wealth relates to behavior, such that they expect the resource rich to be more likely to materially benefit others (including themselves) than the resource poor***. In Studies 1 and 2 (ages 4–10), American children from predominantly middle-income families (n = 94) and Indian children from lower income families (n = 30) predicted that the resource rich would be likelier to share with others than the resource poor. In Study 3, American children (n = 66) made similar predictions in an incentivized decision-making task. The possibility that children's expectations regarding giving contribute to prowealth preferences is discussed.
Abstract: Young children show social preferences for resource-rich individuals, although few studies have explored the causes underlying such preferences. We evaluate the viability of one candidate cause: ***Children believe that resource wealth relates to behavior, such that they expect the resource rich to be more likely to materially benefit others (including themselves) than the resource poor***. In Studies 1 and 2 (ages 4–10), American children from predominantly middle-income families (n = 94) and Indian children from lower income families (n = 30) predicted that the resource rich would be likelier to share with others than the resource poor. In Study 3, American children (n = 66) made similar predictions in an incentivized decision-making task. The possibility that children's expectations regarding giving contribute to prowealth preferences is discussed.
Monday, August 21, 2017
Is There a Dark Side to Mindfulness? Relation of Mindfulness to Criminogenic Cognitions
Is There a Dark Side to Mindfulness? Relation of Mindfulness to Criminogenic Cognitions. June Tangney et al. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0146167217717243
Abstract: In recent years, mindfulness-based interventions have been modified for use with inmate populations, but how this might relate to specific criminogenic cognitions has not been examined empirically. Theoretically, characteristics of mindfulness should be incompatible with distorted patterns of criminal thinking, but is this in fact the case? Among both 259 male jail inmates and 516 undergraduates, mindfulness was inversely related to the Criminogenic Cognitions Scale (CCS) through a latent variable of emotion regulation. However, in the jail sample, this mediational model also showed a direct, positive path from mindfulness to CCS, with an analogous, but nonsignificant trend in the college sample. Post hoc analyses indicate that the Nonjudgment of Self scale derived from the Mindfulness Inventory: Nine Dimensions (MI:ND) largely accounts for this apparently iatrogenic effect in both samples. Some degree of self-judgment is perhaps necessary and useful, especially among individuals involved in the criminal justice system.
Abstract: In recent years, mindfulness-based interventions have been modified for use with inmate populations, but how this might relate to specific criminogenic cognitions has not been examined empirically. Theoretically, characteristics of mindfulness should be incompatible with distorted patterns of criminal thinking, but is this in fact the case? Among both 259 male jail inmates and 516 undergraduates, mindfulness was inversely related to the Criminogenic Cognitions Scale (CCS) through a latent variable of emotion regulation. However, in the jail sample, this mediational model also showed a direct, positive path from mindfulness to CCS, with an analogous, but nonsignificant trend in the college sample. Post hoc analyses indicate that the Nonjudgment of Self scale derived from the Mindfulness Inventory: Nine Dimensions (MI:ND) largely accounts for this apparently iatrogenic effect in both samples. Some degree of self-judgment is perhaps necessary and useful, especially among individuals involved in the criminal justice system.
Examining Regulatory Capture: Evidence from the NHL
Examining Regulatory Capture: Evidence from the NHL. Gregory DeAngelo, Adam Nowak and Imke Reimers. Contemporary Economic Policy, doi:10.1111/coep.12240
Abstract: Regulatory capture has garnered significant attention, but poses a difficult empirical exercise since most relationships between regulators and regulated parties occur behind closed doors. In this research, we overcome this problem by analyzing an environment where the behavior of both the regulator and regulated parties are publicly available. Specifically, we utilize data from the National Hockey League (NHL) to examine the impact of general experience as a referee as well as experience refereeing a particular team on the assignation of penalties. We find that gaining general experience as a referee significantly reduces the number of penalties that a referee assigns. However, as a referee gains experience refereeing a specific team, they significantly reduce the number of penalties assessed to this team relative to teams that they have less experience refereeing, confirming that regulatory capture is observed among referees and teams in the NHL.
Abstract: Regulatory capture has garnered significant attention, but poses a difficult empirical exercise since most relationships between regulators and regulated parties occur behind closed doors. In this research, we overcome this problem by analyzing an environment where the behavior of both the regulator and regulated parties are publicly available. Specifically, we utilize data from the National Hockey League (NHL) to examine the impact of general experience as a referee as well as experience refereeing a particular team on the assignation of penalties. We find that gaining general experience as a referee significantly reduces the number of penalties that a referee assigns. However, as a referee gains experience refereeing a specific team, they significantly reduce the number of penalties assessed to this team relative to teams that they have less experience refereeing, confirming that regulatory capture is observed among referees and teams in the NHL.
Having power increases accuracy in perception of bodily signals
Social Power Increases Interoceptive Accuracy. Mehrad Moeini-Jazani et al. Frontiers in Psychology, August 2017. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01322
Abstract: ***Building on recent psychological research showing that power increases self-focused attention, we propose that having power increases accuracy in perception of bodily signals***, a phenomenon known as interoceptive accuracy. Consistent with our proposition, participants in a high-power experimental condition outperformed those in the control and low-power conditions in the Schandry heartbeat-detection task. We demonstrate that the effect of power on interoceptive accuracy is not explained by participants' physiological arousal, affective state, or general intention for accuracy. Rather, consistent with our reasoning that experiencing power shifts attentional resources inward, we show that the effect of power on interoceptive accuracy is dependent on individuals' chronic tendency to focus on their internal sensations. Moreover, we demonstrate that individuals' chronic sense of power also predicts interoceptive accuracy similar to, and independent of, how their situationally induced feeling of power does. We therefore provide further support on the relation between power and enhanced perception of bodily signals. Our findings offer a novel perspective - a psychophysiological account - on how power might affect judgments and behavior. We highlight and discuss some of these intriguing possibilities for future research.
Abstract: ***Building on recent psychological research showing that power increases self-focused attention, we propose that having power increases accuracy in perception of bodily signals***, a phenomenon known as interoceptive accuracy. Consistent with our proposition, participants in a high-power experimental condition outperformed those in the control and low-power conditions in the Schandry heartbeat-detection task. We demonstrate that the effect of power on interoceptive accuracy is not explained by participants' physiological arousal, affective state, or general intention for accuracy. Rather, consistent with our reasoning that experiencing power shifts attentional resources inward, we show that the effect of power on interoceptive accuracy is dependent on individuals' chronic tendency to focus on their internal sensations. Moreover, we demonstrate that individuals' chronic sense of power also predicts interoceptive accuracy similar to, and independent of, how their situationally induced feeling of power does. We therefore provide further support on the relation between power and enhanced perception of bodily signals. Our findings offer a novel perspective - a psychophysiological account - on how power might affect judgments and behavior. We highlight and discuss some of these intriguing possibilities for future research.
Entwicklung der Punitivität und ausgewählter Einflussfaktoren in der deutschen Bevölkerung in den Jahren 2004 bis 2014
Entwicklung der Punitivität und ausgewählter Einflussfaktoren in der deutschen Bevölkerung in den Jahren 2004 bis 2014 (Development of punitivity and selected influencing factors in the German population in the years 2004 to 2014), von Dirk Baier, Stephanie Fleischer und Michael Hanslmaier. Monatsschrift für Kriminologie und Strafrechtsreform 2017, 1 - 25 (Heft 1)
To date, little is known about –on the one hand– trends in punitivity and other crime related attitudes and –on the other hand– on the explanations of these trends in the German population since the year 2000. Using four representative surveys from 2004, 2006, 2010 and 2014 the study confirms that individual punitive attitudes decrease independent of the indicator that is used. Looking at fear of crime or perceived crime trends the same changes are identified. Explanatory factors of these trends are a rising educational level of the population, a decline in parental violence, a decrease in the number of people who watch television news of private stations and a decrease in the number of people who read tabloid newspapers. However, all the considered influencing factors can not completely explain the trend in punitivity.
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Allerdings können diese vier Faktoren nicht komplett den Entwicklungstrend in der Punitivität erklären. Aus diesem Grund wurden noch weitere Einflussfaktoren betrachtet, zu denen allerdings nur unvollständige Informationen vorliegen. Diese verweisen auf drei weitere Faktoren, die die Entwicklung der Punitivität beeinflusst haben dürften: Erstens handelt es sich um die Internetnutzung. Internetnutzer im Allgemeinen, Nutzer von Internetangeboten deutschlandweiter Tageszeitungen oder öffentlich-rechtlicher Nachrichten im Besonderen weisen eine niedrigere Punitivität auf, zugleich steigen (tendenziell) deren Anteile. Zweitens macht es einen Unterschied, über welche Kanäle man über Verbrechen informiert wird. Erfährt man hauptsächlich über die Medien von Verbrechen, dann erhöht dies die Punitivität; es sind zugleich aber immer weniger Menschen, die sich über die »klassischen« Medien informieren. Das Internet wird in dieser Hinsicht immer wichtiger – was mit Blick auf die Punitivität als unproblematisch einzustufen ist (s.u.). Drittens sinkt der Autoritarismus, der ein wichtiger Einflussfaktor der Punitivität ist.
Die Untersuchung der verschiedenen Einflussfaktoren hat zugleich einige unerwartete Ergebnisse zutage gefördert, die an dieser Stelle erwähnt, aber nicht vertieft diskutiert werden können. So finden sich für alle vier betrachteten Viktimisierungsvariablen (Diebstahl, Körperverletzung, Raub, Wohnungseinbruch) keine Zusammenhänge mit der Punitivität. Es zeigt sich damit zumindest in Bezug auf die bundesdeutsche Bevölkerung, dass Opfer von Straftaten kein Bedürfnis haben, die Täter allgemein härter zu bestrafen. Ein unerwarteter Einfluss ergibt sich für die positiven Erziehungserfahrungen: Befragte, die von einer liebevollen Erziehung berichten, sind punitiver eingestellt (vgl. hierfür auch Baier et al. 2011, 102 f.). Eine solche Erziehung sollte eher davor schützen, härtere Sanktionsformen zu unterstützen. Gleichwohl ist der Effekt letztlich nur in der Befragung 2010 zu beobachten, weshalb er nicht zu hoch gewichtet werden sollte. Ein unerwartetes Ergebnis ergibt sich zudem für die Ost-West-Variable. So erweisen sich Befragte aus Westdeutschland über die Zeit hinweg konstant als weniger punitiv als Befragte aus Ostdeutschland. Dies zeigt sich, wie zusätzliche Auswertungen belegen, bei beiden Punitivitätsindikatoren.
My comment: Because those four factors do not explain the trend in diminishing punitivity, further influencing factors were considered, but only incomplete information is available. These point to three other factors that may have influenced the development of punitivity: First, it is the Internet use. Internet users in general, users of Internet offers in Germany daytime newspapers or public-law news in particular have a lower punitivity. Secondly, it makes a difference about which channels inform about crimes, but fewer and fewer people get information from the "classical" media. The Internet is becoming more and more important in this regard - which can be considered as unproblematic with regard to the punitivity (see above). Thirdly, the authoritarianism, which is an important factor of influence of punitivity.
The investigation of the various influencing factors also revealed some unexpected results, which can be mentioned here but can not be dealt with in depth. For example, there are no correlations with punitivity for all four victimization variables (theft, bodily injury, robbery, burglary). An unexpected influence is found in the positive educational experiences: respondents reporting a loving education are more punitive (see also Baier et al., 2011, 102f.), when the authors expected that such an education should rather protect against harder forms of sanctions. At the same time, the effect is only to be observed in the 2010 survey, which is why it should not be over-weighted. An unexpected result also results for the geographical east-west variable. For example, respondents from West Germany are consistently less punitive than respondents from East Germany. This shows, as additional evaluations prove, with both punitivity indicators.
To date, little is known about –on the one hand– trends in punitivity and other crime related attitudes and –on the other hand– on the explanations of these trends in the German population since the year 2000. Using four representative surveys from 2004, 2006, 2010 and 2014 the study confirms that individual punitive attitudes decrease independent of the indicator that is used. Looking at fear of crime or perceived crime trends the same changes are identified. Explanatory factors of these trends are a rising educational level of the population, a decline in parental violence, a decrease in the number of people who watch television news of private stations and a decrease in the number of people who read tabloid newspapers. However, all the considered influencing factors can not completely explain the trend in punitivity.
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Allerdings können diese vier Faktoren nicht komplett den Entwicklungstrend in der Punitivität erklären. Aus diesem Grund wurden noch weitere Einflussfaktoren betrachtet, zu denen allerdings nur unvollständige Informationen vorliegen. Diese verweisen auf drei weitere Faktoren, die die Entwicklung der Punitivität beeinflusst haben dürften: Erstens handelt es sich um die Internetnutzung. Internetnutzer im Allgemeinen, Nutzer von Internetangeboten deutschlandweiter Tageszeitungen oder öffentlich-rechtlicher Nachrichten im Besonderen weisen eine niedrigere Punitivität auf, zugleich steigen (tendenziell) deren Anteile. Zweitens macht es einen Unterschied, über welche Kanäle man über Verbrechen informiert wird. Erfährt man hauptsächlich über die Medien von Verbrechen, dann erhöht dies die Punitivität; es sind zugleich aber immer weniger Menschen, die sich über die »klassischen« Medien informieren. Das Internet wird in dieser Hinsicht immer wichtiger – was mit Blick auf die Punitivität als unproblematisch einzustufen ist (s.u.). Drittens sinkt der Autoritarismus, der ein wichtiger Einflussfaktor der Punitivität ist.
Die Untersuchung der verschiedenen Einflussfaktoren hat zugleich einige unerwartete Ergebnisse zutage gefördert, die an dieser Stelle erwähnt, aber nicht vertieft diskutiert werden können. So finden sich für alle vier betrachteten Viktimisierungsvariablen (Diebstahl, Körperverletzung, Raub, Wohnungseinbruch) keine Zusammenhänge mit der Punitivität. Es zeigt sich damit zumindest in Bezug auf die bundesdeutsche Bevölkerung, dass Opfer von Straftaten kein Bedürfnis haben, die Täter allgemein härter zu bestrafen. Ein unerwarteter Einfluss ergibt sich für die positiven Erziehungserfahrungen: Befragte, die von einer liebevollen Erziehung berichten, sind punitiver eingestellt (vgl. hierfür auch Baier et al. 2011, 102 f.). Eine solche Erziehung sollte eher davor schützen, härtere Sanktionsformen zu unterstützen. Gleichwohl ist der Effekt letztlich nur in der Befragung 2010 zu beobachten, weshalb er nicht zu hoch gewichtet werden sollte. Ein unerwartetes Ergebnis ergibt sich zudem für die Ost-West-Variable. So erweisen sich Befragte aus Westdeutschland über die Zeit hinweg konstant als weniger punitiv als Befragte aus Ostdeutschland. Dies zeigt sich, wie zusätzliche Auswertungen belegen, bei beiden Punitivitätsindikatoren.
My comment: Because those four factors do not explain the trend in diminishing punitivity, further influencing factors were considered, but only incomplete information is available. These point to three other factors that may have influenced the development of punitivity: First, it is the Internet use. Internet users in general, users of Internet offers in Germany daytime newspapers or public-law news in particular have a lower punitivity. Secondly, it makes a difference about which channels inform about crimes, but fewer and fewer people get information from the "classical" media. The Internet is becoming more and more important in this regard - which can be considered as unproblematic with regard to the punitivity (see above). Thirdly, the authoritarianism, which is an important factor of influence of punitivity.
The investigation of the various influencing factors also revealed some unexpected results, which can be mentioned here but can not be dealt with in depth. For example, there are no correlations with punitivity for all four victimization variables (theft, bodily injury, robbery, burglary). An unexpected influence is found in the positive educational experiences: respondents reporting a loving education are more punitive (see also Baier et al., 2011, 102f.), when the authors expected that such an education should rather protect against harder forms of sanctions. At the same time, the effect is only to be observed in the 2010 survey, which is why it should not be over-weighted. An unexpected result also results for the geographical east-west variable. For example, respondents from West Germany are consistently less punitive than respondents from East Germany. This shows, as additional evaluations prove, with both punitivity indicators.
Behavioral Compensation Before and After Eating at the Minnesota State Fair
Lenne, R. L., Panos, M. E., Auster-Gussman, L., Scherschel, H., Zhou, L., & Mann, T. (2017, August 21). Behavioral Compensation Before and After Eating at the Minnesota State Fair. Appetite, http://doi.org/10.1016/j.appet.2017.07.025
Abstract: People regulate their eating behavior in many ways. They may respond to overeating by compensating with healthy eating behavior or increased exercise (i.e., a sensible tradeoff), or by continuing to eat poorly (i.e., disinhibition). Conversely, people may respond to a healthy eating event by subsequently eating poorly (i.e., self-licensing) or by continuing to eat healthily (i.e., promotion spillover). We propose that people may also change their behaviors in anticipation of an unhealthy eating event, a phenomenon that we will refer to as pre-compensation. Using a survey of 430 attendees of the Minnesota State Fair over two years, we explored whether, when, and how people compensated before and after this tempting eating event. We found evidence that people use both pre-compensatory and post-compensatory strategies, with a preference for changing their eating (rather than exercise) behavior. There was no evidence that people who pre-compensated were more likely to self-license by indulging in a greater number of foods or calories at the fair than those who did not. Finally, people who pre-compensated were more likely to also post-compensate. These results suggest that changing eating or exercise behavior before exposure to a situation with many tempting foods may be a successful strategy for enjoying oneself without excessively overeating.
My comment: some people atones for eating sins even before actually indulging in food.
Abstract: People regulate their eating behavior in many ways. They may respond to overeating by compensating with healthy eating behavior or increased exercise (i.e., a sensible tradeoff), or by continuing to eat poorly (i.e., disinhibition). Conversely, people may respond to a healthy eating event by subsequently eating poorly (i.e., self-licensing) or by continuing to eat healthily (i.e., promotion spillover). We propose that people may also change their behaviors in anticipation of an unhealthy eating event, a phenomenon that we will refer to as pre-compensation. Using a survey of 430 attendees of the Minnesota State Fair over two years, we explored whether, when, and how people compensated before and after this tempting eating event. We found evidence that people use both pre-compensatory and post-compensatory strategies, with a preference for changing their eating (rather than exercise) behavior. There was no evidence that people who pre-compensated were more likely to self-license by indulging in a greater number of foods or calories at the fair than those who did not. Finally, people who pre-compensated were more likely to also post-compensate. These results suggest that changing eating or exercise behavior before exposure to a situation with many tempting foods may be a successful strategy for enjoying oneself without excessively overeating.
My comment: some people atones for eating sins even before actually indulging in food.
Male Violence and Sexual Intimidation in a Wild Primate Society
Male Violence and Sexual Intimidation in a Wild Primate Society. Baniel, Alice et al. Current Biology , Volume 27 , Issue 14 , 2163 - 2168.e3, Jul 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2017.06.013
Highlights
•Male aggression preferentially targets fertile females in chacma baboons
•Male aggression represents a major source of injuries for fertile females
•Male aggressors have higher mating success in the long term, but not immediately
•These results provide evidence for sexual intimidation in a wild non-human primate
Summary: Sexual violence occurring in the context of long-term heterosexual relationships, such as sexual intimidation, is widespread across human populations [ 1–3 ]. However, its evolutionary origins remain speculative because few studies have investigated the existence of comparable forms of sexual coercion in animals [ 4, 5 ], in which repeated male aggression toward a female provides the aggressor with delayed mating benefits [ 6 ]. Here, we test whether male aggression toward females functions as sexual coercion in wild chacma baboons (Papio ursinus). We found support for all three main predictions of the sexual coercion hypothesis [ 7 ]: male aggression (1) is greatest against cycling females, (2) is costly and represents the main source of injuries for cycling females, and (3) increases male mating success with their victims in the future. Detailed analysis of chronological sequences between aggression and matings ruled out other coercive mechanisms, such as short-term harassment and punishment, by showing that aggression and matings are temporally decoupled. This decoupling may explain why some forms of sexual violence have been largely overlooked in well-studied animal populations despite their likely impact on the fitness of both sexes. Finally, we found no support for alternative hypotheses such as a female preference for aggressive males [ 8, 9 ]. This new, detailed study of the forms and intensity of sexual intimidation in a wild primate suggests that it may be widespread across mammalian societies, with important implications for understanding the evolution of mate choice and sexual conflict in mammals, as well as the origins of human sexual violence.
Keywords: sexual conflict, sexual coercion, intersexual aggression, intimidation, promiscuous mating, injury, mating success, sex roles, primates
My comment: this behavior has been observed in at least two primate species, chimpanzees and now baboons... It could mean that it is a very old behavior in humans, not a recent one or due to socialization (although the environment can ameliorate simptoms or can make them more salient).
Highlights
•Male aggression preferentially targets fertile females in chacma baboons
•Male aggression represents a major source of injuries for fertile females
•Male aggressors have higher mating success in the long term, but not immediately
•These results provide evidence for sexual intimidation in a wild non-human primate
Summary: Sexual violence occurring in the context of long-term heterosexual relationships, such as sexual intimidation, is widespread across human populations [ 1–3 ]. However, its evolutionary origins remain speculative because few studies have investigated the existence of comparable forms of sexual coercion in animals [ 4, 5 ], in which repeated male aggression toward a female provides the aggressor with delayed mating benefits [ 6 ]. Here, we test whether male aggression toward females functions as sexual coercion in wild chacma baboons (Papio ursinus). We found support for all three main predictions of the sexual coercion hypothesis [ 7 ]: male aggression (1) is greatest against cycling females, (2) is costly and represents the main source of injuries for cycling females, and (3) increases male mating success with their victims in the future. Detailed analysis of chronological sequences between aggression and matings ruled out other coercive mechanisms, such as short-term harassment and punishment, by showing that aggression and matings are temporally decoupled. This decoupling may explain why some forms of sexual violence have been largely overlooked in well-studied animal populations despite their likely impact on the fitness of both sexes. Finally, we found no support for alternative hypotheses such as a female preference for aggressive males [ 8, 9 ]. This new, detailed study of the forms and intensity of sexual intimidation in a wild primate suggests that it may be widespread across mammalian societies, with important implications for understanding the evolution of mate choice and sexual conflict in mammals, as well as the origins of human sexual violence.
Keywords: sexual conflict, sexual coercion, intersexual aggression, intimidation, promiscuous mating, injury, mating success, sex roles, primates
My comment: this behavior has been observed in at least two primate species, chimpanzees and now baboons... It could mean that it is a very old behavior in humans, not a recent one or due to socialization (although the environment can ameliorate simptoms or can make them more salient).
Check also: Sexually Coercive Male Chimpanzees Sire More Offspring. Joseph T. Feldblum et al. Current Biology, Volume 24, Issue 23, p2855–2860, 1 December 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2014.10.039
Highlights
•Aggression toward sexually receptive females correlated with male mating success
•Aggression toward non-sexually receptive females was associated with paternity
•The effect of aggression on paternity was strongest for high-ranking males
•This represents the first genetic evidence of long-term sexual coercion in mammals
Summary: In sexually reproducing animals, male and female reproductive strategies often conflict [ 1 ]. In some species, males use aggression to overcome female choice [ 2, 3 ], but debate persists over the extent to which this strategy is successful. Previous studies of male aggression toward females among wild chimpanzees have yielded contradictory results about the relationship between aggression and mating behavior [ 4–11 ]. Critically, however, copulation frequency in primates is not always predictive of reproductive success [ 12 ]. We analyzed a 17-year sample of behavioral and genetic data from the Kasekela chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii) community in Gombe National Park, Tanzania, to test the hypothesis that male aggression toward females increases male reproductive success. We examined the effect of male aggression toward females during ovarian cycling, including periods when the females were sexually receptive (swollen) and periods when they were not. We found that, after controlling for confounding factors, male aggression during a female’s swollen periods was positively correlated with copulation frequency. However, aggression toward swollen females was not predictive of paternity. Instead, aggression by high-ranking males toward females during their nonswollen periods was positively associated with likelihood of paternity. This indicates that long-term patterns of intimidation allow high-ranking males to increase their reproductive success, supporting the sexual coercion hypothesis. To our knowledge, this is the first study to present genetic evidence of sexual coercion as an adaptive strategy in a social mammal.
Also: Survival of the Fittest and the Sexiest: Evolutionary Origins of Adolescent Bullying. Jun-Bin Koh, and Jennifer S. Wong. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, https://www.bipartisanalliance.com/2017/08/survival-of-fittest-and-sexiest.html
And also: We, Too, Are Violent Animals. By Jane Goodall, Richard Wrangham, and Dale Peterson. Those who doubt that human aggression is an evolved trait should spend more time with chimpanzees and wolves The Wall Street Journal, January 5, 2013, on page C3, https://www.bipartisanalliance.com/2013/01/we-too-are-violent-animals-by-jane.html
And also: Romanticizing the Hunter-Gatherer. William Buckner. Quillette, December 16, 2017. https://www.bipartisanalliance.com/2017/12/romanticizing-hunter-gatherer-despite.html
Sunday, August 20, 2017
An Analysis of the Fake News Audience in the Lead Up to the 2016 Presidential Election
Nelson, Jacob. (2017). Fake News, Fake Problem? An Analysis of the Fake News Audience in the Lead Up to the 2016 Presidential Election. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/318470831_Fake_News_Fake_Problem_An_Analysis_of_the_Fake_News_Audience_in_the_Lead_Up_to_the_2016_Presidential_Election
Abstract: In light of the recent U.S. election, many fear that “fake news” has become a powerful and sinister force in the news media environment. These fears stem from the idea that as news consumption increasingly takes place via social media sites, news audiences are more likely to find themselves drawn in by sensational headlines to sources that lack accuracy or legitimacy, with troubling consequences for democracy. However, we know little about the extent to which online audiences are exposed to fake news, and how these outlets factor into the average digital news diet. In this paper, I argue that fears about fake news consumption echo fears about partisan selective exposure, in that both stem from concerns that more media choice leads audiences to consume news that align with their beliefs, and to ignore news that does not. Yet recent studies have concluded that the partisan media audience (1) is small and (2) also consumes news from popular, centrist outlets. I use online news audience data to show a similar phenomenon plays out when it comes to fake news. Findings reveal that social media does indeed play an outsized role in generating traffic to fake news sites; however, the actual fake news audience is small, and a large portion of it also visits more popular, “real” news sites. I conclude by discussing the implications of a news media landscape where the audience is exposed to contradictory sources of public affairs information.
Abstract: In light of the recent U.S. election, many fear that “fake news” has become a powerful and sinister force in the news media environment. These fears stem from the idea that as news consumption increasingly takes place via social media sites, news audiences are more likely to find themselves drawn in by sensational headlines to sources that lack accuracy or legitimacy, with troubling consequences for democracy. However, we know little about the extent to which online audiences are exposed to fake news, and how these outlets factor into the average digital news diet. In this paper, I argue that fears about fake news consumption echo fears about partisan selective exposure, in that both stem from concerns that more media choice leads audiences to consume news that align with their beliefs, and to ignore news that does not. Yet recent studies have concluded that the partisan media audience (1) is small and (2) also consumes news from popular, centrist outlets. I use online news audience data to show a similar phenomenon plays out when it comes to fake news. Findings reveal that social media does indeed play an outsized role in generating traffic to fake news sites; however, the actual fake news audience is small, and a large portion of it also visits more popular, “real” news sites. I conclude by discussing the implications of a news media landscape where the audience is exposed to contradictory sources of public affairs information.
Public Order and Private Payments: Evidence from the Swedish Soccer League
Public Order and Private Payments: Evidence from the Swedish Soccer League. Sten Nyberg and Mikael Priks. Journal of Public Economics, September 2017, Pages 1-8, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpubeco.2017.07.005
Highlights
• Private security at public events can be subject to free-riding and externalities.
• Co-payments for police at events can improve incentives for organizers.
• We examine a natural experiment with co-payments in the Swedish soccer league.
• Results show that co-payments increase private security and reduce unruly behavior.
Abstract: Should organizers of events share the associated costs of maintaining public order? We address this question by using unique data from the Swedish soccer league where co-payment for police were introduced for some clubs only. The difference-in-differences analysis shows that co-payments increased private guards by 40 percent and suggests a reduction of unruly behavior by 20 percent. The results are consistent with our model, where co-payments alleviate under-provision in efforts by organizers to combat problems such as hooliganism due to exernalities and free-riding on police services. The model also sheds light on the critique that co-payments could lead financially constrained organizers to provide less security.
Highlights
• Private security at public events can be subject to free-riding and externalities.
• Co-payments for police at events can improve incentives for organizers.
• We examine a natural experiment with co-payments in the Swedish soccer league.
• Results show that co-payments increase private security and reduce unruly behavior.
Abstract: Should organizers of events share the associated costs of maintaining public order? We address this question by using unique data from the Swedish soccer league where co-payment for police were introduced for some clubs only. The difference-in-differences analysis shows that co-payments increased private guards by 40 percent and suggests a reduction of unruly behavior by 20 percent. The results are consistent with our model, where co-payments alleviate under-provision in efforts by organizers to combat problems such as hooliganism due to exernalities and free-riding on police services. The model also sheds light on the critique that co-payments could lead financially constrained organizers to provide less security.
The association between urban tree cover and gun assault: a case-control and casecrossover study
The association between urban tree cover and gun assault: a case-control and casecrossover study. Michelle Kondo et al. American Journal of Epidemiology, 1 August 2017, Pages 289–296.
Abstract: Green space and vegetation may play a protective role against urban violence. We investigated whether being near urban tree cover during outdoor activities was related to being assaulted with a gun. We conducted geographic information systems–assisted interviews with boys and men aged 10–24 years in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, including 135 patients who had been shot with a firearm and 274 community controls, during 2008–2011. Each subject reported a step-by-step mapped account of where and with whom they traveled over a full day from waking until being assaulted or going to bed. Geocoded path points were overlaid on mapped layers representing tree locations and place-specific characteristics. Conditional logistic regressions were used to compare case subjects versus controls (case-control) and case subjects at the time of injury versus times earlier that day (case-crossover). When comparing cases at the time of assault to controls matched at the same time of day, being under tree cover was inversely associated with gunshot assault (odds ratio (OR) = 0.70, 95% confidence interval (CI): 0.55, 0.88), especially in low-income areas (OR = 0.69, 95% CI: 0.54, 0.87). Case-crossover models confirmed this inverse association overall (OR = 0.55, 95% CI: 0.34, 0.89) and in low-income areas (OR = 0.54, 95% CI: 0.33, 0.88). Urban greening and tree cover may hold promise as proactive strategies to decrease urban violence.
My comment: Obviously, the shooter finds less interesting someone near an obstacle, to shoot well is already difficult and not to miss a shot when the victim can duck under some object is even more difficult, so you try to get those with no cover, i.e., those in the open.
Abstract: Green space and vegetation may play a protective role against urban violence. We investigated whether being near urban tree cover during outdoor activities was related to being assaulted with a gun. We conducted geographic information systems–assisted interviews with boys and men aged 10–24 years in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, including 135 patients who had been shot with a firearm and 274 community controls, during 2008–2011. Each subject reported a step-by-step mapped account of where and with whom they traveled over a full day from waking until being assaulted or going to bed. Geocoded path points were overlaid on mapped layers representing tree locations and place-specific characteristics. Conditional logistic regressions were used to compare case subjects versus controls (case-control) and case subjects at the time of injury versus times earlier that day (case-crossover). When comparing cases at the time of assault to controls matched at the same time of day, being under tree cover was inversely associated with gunshot assault (odds ratio (OR) = 0.70, 95% confidence interval (CI): 0.55, 0.88), especially in low-income areas (OR = 0.69, 95% CI: 0.54, 0.87). Case-crossover models confirmed this inverse association overall (OR = 0.55, 95% CI: 0.34, 0.89) and in low-income areas (OR = 0.54, 95% CI: 0.33, 0.88). Urban greening and tree cover may hold promise as proactive strategies to decrease urban violence.
My comment: Obviously, the shooter finds less interesting someone near an obstacle, to shoot well is already difficult and not to miss a shot when the victim can duck under some object is even more difficult, so you try to get those with no cover, i.e., those in the open.
Using Cognitive Dissonance to Explore Attitudinal Hypocrisy
Having Your Cake and Eating It Too: Using Cognitive Dissonance to Explore Attitudinal Hypocrisy. Timothy P. Collins. Chapter 6 of Hypocrisy in American Political Attitudes: A Defense of Attitudinal Incongruence, pp 247-288. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-54012-2_6. ISBN: 978-3-319-54011-5 (Print) 978-3-319-54012-2 (Online)
Abstract: The extent to which a person has attitudes that contradict other attitudes is simply cognitive dissonance by another name. I review cognitive dissonance literature and design a survey experiment in which Midwestern university students’ personal perceptions of and distastes for being accused of being hypocritical are tested in an induced compliance research procedure. The results suggest that, in contrast to previous research and the well-established expectations, the participants were only minimally troubled by the idea that they may be hypocritical. For those who were troubled, political ideology and identity had only marginal predictive effects; instead, the traits of dogmatism and openness to experience appeared to supplant the expected roles of ideological orientations.
Abstract: The extent to which a person has attitudes that contradict other attitudes is simply cognitive dissonance by another name. I review cognitive dissonance literature and design a survey experiment in which Midwestern university students’ personal perceptions of and distastes for being accused of being hypocritical are tested in an induced compliance research procedure. The results suggest that, in contrast to previous research and the well-established expectations, the participants were only minimally troubled by the idea that they may be hypocritical. For those who were troubled, political ideology and identity had only marginal predictive effects; instead, the traits of dogmatism and openness to experience appeared to supplant the expected roles of ideological orientations.
Obviously they [conservatives] are hypocrites in that they want small government but then want to ban gay marriage and increase spending on national defense. You simply can’t have the best of both worlds.—Liberal experimental participant
Liberals are hypocrites because like Obama he wants equality but then he is exempt from Obamacare.—Conservative experimental participant
The perception of emotion in artificial agents
Hortensius, R., Hekele, F., & Cross, E. S. (2017, August 1). The perception of emotion in artificial agents. Retrieved from PsyArXiv osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/ufz5w
Abstract: Given recent technological developments in robotics, artificial intelligence and virtual reality, it is perhaps unsurprising that the arrival of emotionally expressive and reactive artificial agents is imminent. However, if such agents are to become integrated into our social milieu, it is imperative to establish an understanding of whether and how humans perceive emotion in artificial agents. In this review, we incorporate recent findings from social robotics, virtual reality, psychology, and neuroscience to examine how people recognize and respond to emotions displayed by artificial agents. First, we review how people perceive emotions expressed by an artificial agent, such as facial and bodily expressions and vocal tone. Second, we evaluate the similarities and differences in the consequences of perceived emotions in artificial compared to human agents. Besides accurately recognizing the emotional state of an artificial agent, it is critical to understand how humans respond to those emotions. Does interacting with an angry robot induce the same responses in people as interacting with an angry person? Similarly, does watching a robot rejoice when it wins a game elicit similar feelings of elation in the human observer? Here we provide an overview of the current state of emotion expression and perception in social robotics, as well as a clear articulation of the challenges to be addressed as we move ever closer to truly emotional artificial agents.
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In the original Milgram study, participants were instructed that they would collaborate with the experimenter to investigate the effects of punishment on learning. To this end, the participant was instructed to administer electric shocks of increasing voltage to a learner – who was actually a confederate – whenever he made a mistake in the learning task. At a certain threshold of 300V, the learner no longer responded to the task and kicked the wall in protest, yet the average maximum shock had a voltage of 312V. Twenty-six out of 40 participants were willing to deliver the maximum intensity of 450V to the learner. This paradigm has subsequently been used to test whether and to what extent people will punish an artificial agent (Fig. 3). One replication of the classic Milgram experiment might provide insight [98]. The experiment featured a physically present robot learner, which led to even more pronounced effects than the original study –the highest electric shock of 450V was administered to the robot, despite its verbal protest and painful facial expression, by all participants.
Another study used a female virtual learner in a similar setup where participants read words to the learner and were able to punish the learner with shocks when she made a mistake [99]. The virtual learner was either visible or partially hidden throughout the experiment, which influenced the amount of shocks administered, with fewer shocks being administered when the virtual learner was fully visible. Overall results were similar to the original Milgram experiment, with 85% of participants delivering the maximum voltage. Even though all participants were aware that the learner was a virtual agent, the visual and verbal expression of pain in response to the shock was sufficient to trigger discomfort and stress in participants.
Abstract: Given recent technological developments in robotics, artificial intelligence and virtual reality, it is perhaps unsurprising that the arrival of emotionally expressive and reactive artificial agents is imminent. However, if such agents are to become integrated into our social milieu, it is imperative to establish an understanding of whether and how humans perceive emotion in artificial agents. In this review, we incorporate recent findings from social robotics, virtual reality, psychology, and neuroscience to examine how people recognize and respond to emotions displayed by artificial agents. First, we review how people perceive emotions expressed by an artificial agent, such as facial and bodily expressions and vocal tone. Second, we evaluate the similarities and differences in the consequences of perceived emotions in artificial compared to human agents. Besides accurately recognizing the emotional state of an artificial agent, it is critical to understand how humans respond to those emotions. Does interacting with an angry robot induce the same responses in people as interacting with an angry person? Similarly, does watching a robot rejoice when it wins a game elicit similar feelings of elation in the human observer? Here we provide an overview of the current state of emotion expression and perception in social robotics, as well as a clear articulation of the challenges to be addressed as we move ever closer to truly emotional artificial agents.
---
In the original Milgram study, participants were instructed that they would collaborate with the experimenter to investigate the effects of punishment on learning. To this end, the participant was instructed to administer electric shocks of increasing voltage to a learner – who was actually a confederate – whenever he made a mistake in the learning task. At a certain threshold of 300V, the learner no longer responded to the task and kicked the wall in protest, yet the average maximum shock had a voltage of 312V. Twenty-six out of 40 participants were willing to deliver the maximum intensity of 450V to the learner. This paradigm has subsequently been used to test whether and to what extent people will punish an artificial agent (Fig. 3). One replication of the classic Milgram experiment might provide insight [98]. The experiment featured a physically present robot learner, which led to even more pronounced effects than the original study –the highest electric shock of 450V was administered to the robot, despite its verbal protest and painful facial expression, by all participants.
Another study used a female virtual learner in a similar setup where participants read words to the learner and were able to punish the learner with shocks when she made a mistake [99]. The virtual learner was either visible or partially hidden throughout the experiment, which influenced the amount of shocks administered, with fewer shocks being administered when the virtual learner was fully visible. Overall results were similar to the original Milgram experiment, with 85% of participants delivering the maximum voltage. Even though all participants were aware that the learner was a virtual agent, the visual and verbal expression of pain in response to the shock was sufficient to trigger discomfort and stress in participants.
Attractiveness of the female body: Preference for average or supernormal?
Slobodan Markovic, Tara Bulut, "Attractiveness of the female body: Preference for average or supernormal?" in: Paolo Bernardis, Carlo Fantoni, Walter Gerbino (eds.) "TSPC2016: Proceedings of the Trieste Symposium on Perception and Cognition, November 4th 2016", Trieste, EUT Edizioni Università di Trieste, 2016, p. 28. http://hdl.handle.net/10077/14979
The main purpose of the present study was to contrast the two hypotheses of female body attractiveness. The first is the “preference-for-average” hypothesis: the most attractive female body is the one that represents the average body proportions for a given population [1]. The second is the “preference-for-supernormal” hypothesis: according to the so-called “peak shift effect”, the most attractive female body is more feminine than the average [2]. We investigated the preference for three female body parts: waist to hip ratio (WHR), buttocks and breasts. There were 456 participants of both genders. Using a program for computer animation (DAZ 3D) three sets of stimuli were generated (WHR, buttocks and breasts). Each set included six stimuli ranked from the lowest to the highest femininity level. Participants were asked to choose the stimulus within each set which they found most attractive (task 1) and average (task 2). One group of participants judged the body parts that were presented in the global condition (whole body), while the other group judged the stimuli in the local condition (isolated body parts only).
[...]
In short, these findings support the preference-for-supernormal hypothesis: the most attractive WHR, buttocks and breasts are more feminine than average ones, for both genders and in both presentation conditions.
The main purpose of the present study was to contrast the two hypotheses of female body attractiveness. The first is the “preference-for-average” hypothesis: the most attractive female body is the one that represents the average body proportions for a given population [1]. The second is the “preference-for-supernormal” hypothesis: according to the so-called “peak shift effect”, the most attractive female body is more feminine than the average [2]. We investigated the preference for three female body parts: waist to hip ratio (WHR), buttocks and breasts. There were 456 participants of both genders. Using a program for computer animation (DAZ 3D) three sets of stimuli were generated (WHR, buttocks and breasts). Each set included six stimuli ranked from the lowest to the highest femininity level. Participants were asked to choose the stimulus within each set which they found most attractive (task 1) and average (task 2). One group of participants judged the body parts that were presented in the global condition (whole body), while the other group judged the stimuli in the local condition (isolated body parts only).
[...]
In short, these findings support the preference-for-supernormal hypothesis: the most attractive WHR, buttocks and breasts are more feminine than average ones, for both genders and in both presentation conditions.
Food addiction among sexual minorities
Food addiction among sexual minorities. Jacob C. Rainey, Celina R. Furman, and Ashley N. Gearhardt. Appetite, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.appet.2017.08.019
Abstract: Although sexual minorities represent a small proportion of the general population, this group has been observed to be at an increased risk of developing various pathologies, including substance use and eating disorders. Research suggests that foods high in added fat and refined carbohydrates may trigger an addictive response, especially in at-risk individuals. Consequently, food addiction is associated with elevated risk for obesity, diet-related disease, and psychological distress. However, there is limited research on whether food addiction, like substance use, may be elevated among sexual minorities, and whether self-compassion may be a protective factor. Thus, the current study aims to test whether food addiction is elevated in sexual minorities (relative to heterosexuals) and if discrimination and self-compassion may be related to food addiction among sexual minorities. ***In a community sample of 356 participants (43.3% sexual minority), sexual minorities had almost twice the prevalence of food addiction (16.9%) as heterosexuals (8.9%). Also, sexual minorities on average experienced more food addiction symptoms*** (M = 2.73, SD = 1.76) than heterosexuals (M = 1.95, SD = 1.59). ***For sexual minorities, heterosexist harassment was associated with increased food addiction, while self-compassion appeared to be a protective factor***. Further research needs to examine between-group differences among sexual minorities for better treatment and interventions for food addiction.
Abstract: Although sexual minorities represent a small proportion of the general population, this group has been observed to be at an increased risk of developing various pathologies, including substance use and eating disorders. Research suggests that foods high in added fat and refined carbohydrates may trigger an addictive response, especially in at-risk individuals. Consequently, food addiction is associated with elevated risk for obesity, diet-related disease, and psychological distress. However, there is limited research on whether food addiction, like substance use, may be elevated among sexual minorities, and whether self-compassion may be a protective factor. Thus, the current study aims to test whether food addiction is elevated in sexual minorities (relative to heterosexuals) and if discrimination and self-compassion may be related to food addiction among sexual minorities. ***In a community sample of 356 participants (43.3% sexual minority), sexual minorities had almost twice the prevalence of food addiction (16.9%) as heterosexuals (8.9%). Also, sexual minorities on average experienced more food addiction symptoms*** (M = 2.73, SD = 1.76) than heterosexuals (M = 1.95, SD = 1.59). ***For sexual minorities, heterosexist harassment was associated with increased food addiction, while self-compassion appeared to be a protective factor***. Further research needs to examine between-group differences among sexual minorities for better treatment and interventions for food addiction.
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