Economic status cues from clothes affect perceived competence from faces. DongWon Oh, Eldar Shafir & Alexander Todorov. Nature Human Behaviour, December 9 2019. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-019-0782-4
Abstract: Impressions of competence from faces predict important real-world outcomes, including electoral success and chief executive officer selection. Presumed competence is associated with social status. Here we show that subtle economic status cues in clothes affect perceived competence from faces. In nine studies, people rated the competence of faces presented in frontal headshots. Faces were shown with different upper-body clothing rated by independent judges as looking ‘richer’ or ‘poorer’, although not notably perceived as such when explicitly described. The same face when seen with ‘richer’ clothes was judged significantly more competent than with ‘poorer’ clothes. The effect persisted even when perceivers were exposed to the stimuli briefly (129 ms), warned that clothing cues are non-informative and instructed to ignore the clothes (in one study, with considerable incentives). These findings demonstrate the uncontrollable effect of economic status cues on person perception. They add yet another hurdle to the challenges faced by low-status individuals.
Discussion
Across studies, we found that economic status clothing cues influenced competence judgements of faces. The effect persisted when faces were presented very briefly (that is, 129 ms), when informa-tion was provided related to the person’s profession and income, when formal clothing was replaced by more casual clothing, when participants were advised to ignore the clothing, when they were warned that there was no relationship between clothing and com-petence before choosing rather than rating faces, and when partici-pants were offered a monetary reward for accuracy. These findings support the notion of uncontrollable effects of minor contextual cues in face perception, and are consistent with a large body of research that finds people spontaneously encode the context surrounding a face when making social judgements10,11,13,19 (while our focus has been on competence judgements, similar, if attenuated, effects can be observed for other traits, such as trustworthiness; see Supplementary Results and Supplementary Fig. 8).
The strong and persistent effects we observed are consistent with theoretical work16,18 and empirical findings16,17, showing a robust tendency for people of lower economic status to be perceived as less competent and to be disrespected20, often leading to social exclu-sion with detrimental effects on physical and emotional health21. Poverty is a place where many challenges—physical, social and psychological—converge: being perceived as of lower competence and disrespected adds to those challenges, and can exacerbate cognitive load and hamper performance, thereby potentially prov-ing self-fulfilling22,23.
To overcome a bias, one needs not only to be aware of it but to have the time, attentional resources and motivation to counteract the bias24. In our studies, we warned participants about the potential bias, presented them with varying lengths of exposure, gave them additional information about the targets and offered financial incen-tives, all intended to alleviate the effect. None of these interventions were effective, however. While it is possible that higher incentives and greater experience could reduce the bias, its persistence in the face of our various manipulations is impressive.
The present findings demonstrate that economic status cues from clothes naturally intervene in people’s assessments of compe-tence. This is consistent with research showing that people associ-ate status with competence in stereotypes of social groups16,25. This strong status–competence association suggests that any attempt at independen manipulation of the apparent competence and eco-nomic status of a person may need to resort to explicit and salient manipulations, rather than fairly subtle cues.
The poor clothing cues in our studies were benign compared to real-world poverty signals. Recent work has shown that people can accurately guess others’ social class from brief exposure to photos or speech recordings26. We might thus expect people wearing truly impoverished clothes or exhibiting other peripheral signs of poverty to encounter substantial low-competence stereotyping, both when perceivers think fast as well as when they have more time to deliberate.Stereotypes about rich and poor individuals are common, prom-inent and consequential. Just as the clothing cues in our studies led to differential disambiguation of facial competence, views about a person’s economic background can lead to notably different inter-pretations of what is otherwise ambiguous performance27. Beyond their immediate impact, an important question for future research concerns the extent to which we might be able to transcend first impressions.
Tuesday, December 10, 2019
Monday, December 9, 2019
Our results indicate that conscientiousness is positively associated with wages, while ***agreeableness***, extraversion, and neuroticism are associated with negative returns
McLean, D., Bouaissa, M., Rainville, B., & Auger, L. (2019). Non-Cognitive Skills: How Much Do They Matter for Earnings in Canada?. American Journal of Management, 19(4). https://doi.org/10.33423/ajm.v19i4.2392
Abstract: Evidence from different countries suggests that non-cognitive skills play an important role in wage determination and overall social outcomes, but studies for Canada are scarce. We contribute to filling this gap by estimating wage regressions with the Big Five traits using the Longitudinal and International Study of Adults. Our results indicate that conscientiousness is positively associated with wages, while agreeableness, extraversion, and neuroticism are associated with negative returns, with higher magnitudes on agreeableness and conscientiousness for females. Cognitive ability has the highest estimated wage return so, while significant, non-cognitive skills do not seem to be the most important wage determinant.
Keywords: Management, Labour Market, Returns to Skills, Non-Cognitive Skill, Cognitive Skill, Wage Regressions, Personality Traits, Five-Factor Model
REVIEW OF RELEVANT LITERATURE
Gary Becker set the stage for the present analysis in the 1960s by being among the first to formally
describe the process of engaging in education as an individual investment decision, with pay-offs in the form of higher future wages. This ultimately motivated Jacob Mincer ten years later to develop the famous Mincer Equation, which attributed differences in cross-sectional wages to differentials in
schooling and experience.
In this framework, cognitive ability is seen as an endowment factor which differentiates marginal
productivity, helping to partially explain wage differentials. Cawley, Heckman and Vytlacil (2001)
estimate the magnitude of this effect using the NLSY survey, showing that a one standard deviation
increase in innate thinking ability is associated with between 10% and 15% higher wages. Both Cawley, Heckman and Vytlacil (2001) and Cunha, Heckman, Lochner and Masterov (2006) also suggest that, rather than being a fixed endowment, cognitive ability can evolve over a lifetime, dynamically affecting wages both through increased schooling and higher productivity. More recently, Hanushek, Schwerdt, Wiederhold, and Woessmann (2015) used data from the 2012 Programme for International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) survey to examine the relationship between numeracy and literacy abilities and wages. They find evidence of a positive relationship, however concede that the selection process of high-skilled individuals into higher levels of schooling may confound the true effect. Cawley, Heckman and Vytlacil (2001) find that cognitive ability, while statistically a significant predictor of income, explains only a small fraction of the variation in income, suggesting that other, unobserved factors may also play a key role in determining economic success. This then opens the discussion on the ability of other unobserved traits to affect economic outcomes of an individual. Mischel (1973) argued that personality traits are one fundamental factor in helping determine how an individual responds to stimulus in their environment in a consistent way. Thus we could reasonably expect personality traits to form a part of an individual's stock of human capital and to be associated with labour market outcomes.
Non-cognitive skills are notoriously difficult to measure, given the lack of consensus in the literature
on their definition and which proxies are most appropriate. One strategy that has received widespread
acceptance involves quantifying non-cognitive skills using the Five Factor Model (Goldberg, 1971; Costa and McCrae, 1985). The Five Factor model posits the existence of five distinct but not necessarily orthogonal personality characteristics, the Big Five personality traits. These characteristics, Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism, are traits that are theorised to help determine a personality that is consistent across time and situation. The Big Five are derived from well-established definitions in the psychology literature dating back to the seminal lexical work by Allport and Odbert (1936), and have seen applications in numerous economic studies attempting to find links between personality and learning, work, romantic and social outcomes. The traits are characterised as relative rigid over the life cycle, particularly by the age of 25-30 (Cobb-Clark and Schurer, 2011).1
Each of the Big Five dimensions in turn are made up of several smaller personality facets, which are
typically more easily measured using survey questions. John and Srivastava (1999), McCrae and John
(1992) and others outline the history of the Five Factor Model and in particular highlight which facets are associated with which personality dimensions. Openness to Experience, for example, is associated with concepts at the intersection of intelligence and ingenuity such as imagination, being artistic and
thoughtfulness. Neuroticism, on the other hand, is associated with facets such as anxiety, selfconsciousness, and vulnerability. Facets for the other three dimensions can be found in Appendix A.
While the Five Factor Model has its criticisms, its robustness, relative ease of interpretation and
applicability to survey questionnaires have made it an attractive option for economists interested in
studying personality. Numerous papers have attempted to tie these personality traits to economic
outcomes, including two early papers by Barrick and Mount (1991) and Tett, Jackson and Rothstein
(1991) who review work linking these characteristics to the labour market. Barrick et al. in particular find that conscientiousness has a strong positive correlation with job performance for all occupational groups, while the impact of the other four traits are differentiated by occupation type. Judge, Higgins, Thoresen Barrick and Murray (1999) use longitudinal data to find that conscientiousness and extraversion are positively related to various metrics of career success, while neuroticism and agreeableness are negatively correlated. Nyhus and Pons (2005), Mueller and Plug (2006), and Heineck and Anger (2010) unanimously find that conscientiousness is the most positively associated with and predictive of higher earnings, while agreeableness and neuroticism may be associated with negative returns. Nyhus and Pons find extraversion to have negative returns, while Mueller and Plug find this is true only for females.
Mueller and Plug are also the only to find a positive estimated return to openness to experience. Almlund (2011) affirm these main findings, suggesting that conscientiousness is the best overall predictor of job performance, though this correlation decreases with increased job complexity. Openness to experience and extraversion are found to be positively associated with job performance but only indirectly through education. A positive relationship between extraversion and education is not a consistent finding, however, as Goldberg (1998) and van Eijck and de Graaf (2004) find a slight negative relationship between educational attainment and neuroticism, extraversion and agreeableness.
Of course, using the Big Five dimensions is also not the only identification strategy used in the
literature. In a highly influential paper, Heckman and Rubinstein (2001) use enrolment in a General
Education Development (GED) program as a measure of non-cognitive skill and find that differences in social skills between GED and high school graduates explain a large proportion of the wage differential between the two groups. Heckman, Stixrud and Urzua (2006) used the Rotter Locus of Control Scale and the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale derived from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) as their preferred indicators, again finding evidence that non-cognitive skills strongly influence schooling decisions and wages. In another influential paper, Lindqvist and Vestman (2011) use an administrative dataset of Swedish military enlistees to derive a measure of personality as assessed by interviews with professional psychologists. Their results show that individuals who struggle with low earnings and unemployment are systematically characterised by low non-cognitive skill scores. Borghans, ter Weel and Weinberg (2014) use data from the NLSY to determine if differences in non-cognitive skills are able to predict wage differentials between minority and gender groups. In a related line of thinking, they look at whether returns to what they term ‘people skills’ have increased or decreased with time. They find that, between the 1970s and 1990s, non-cognitive skills have become increasingly important determinants of wages, which they attribute to an increased substitution of technology to perform tasks. This line of reasoning is affirmed by Weinberger (2014), Deming (2017) and Edin, Fredriksson, Nybom and Öckert (2017), who each find evidence of returns to non-cognitive skills increasing over time, and their growing importance to working in high-paying managerial occupations.
While the existing literature provides evidence for a wide array of OECD countries, to our
knowledge there is only one paper that examines the data specifically for Canada. Green and Riddell
(2003) use Canadian male respondents from the 1994 International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS) to
conclude that an individual's cognitive abilities are primarily established during formal schooling. In line with the literature, they also suggest that cognitive and non-cognitive skills affect earnings both
independently and through an interplay between them. Our work in this paper thus builds upon the
foundation established by Heckman, Green and Riddel and others that already exists in the literature. We contribute to the knowledge gap in the literature first by directly measuring both cognitive and noncognitive skills and focussing on how cognitive and non-cognitive skills are independently rewarded in the Canadian labour market. To our knowledge, we are also among the first to use the Longitudinal
International Survey of Adults (LISA) to analyse this question, which will allow us to offer further
empirical evidence to the literature from an under-studied OECD country. The advantages of using the LISA survey are two-fold. First, it offers some of the most recent data available for studying earnings and wage data, and will also allow for the robust examination of heterogeneity in cognitive and non-cognitive skill returns across a wide spectrum of Canadian workers.1
Abstract: Evidence from different countries suggests that non-cognitive skills play an important role in wage determination and overall social outcomes, but studies for Canada are scarce. We contribute to filling this gap by estimating wage regressions with the Big Five traits using the Longitudinal and International Study of Adults. Our results indicate that conscientiousness is positively associated with wages, while agreeableness, extraversion, and neuroticism are associated with negative returns, with higher magnitudes on agreeableness and conscientiousness for females. Cognitive ability has the highest estimated wage return so, while significant, non-cognitive skills do not seem to be the most important wage determinant.
Keywords: Management, Labour Market, Returns to Skills, Non-Cognitive Skill, Cognitive Skill, Wage Regressions, Personality Traits, Five-Factor Model
REVIEW OF RELEVANT LITERATURE
Gary Becker set the stage for the present analysis in the 1960s by being among the first to formally
describe the process of engaging in education as an individual investment decision, with pay-offs in the form of higher future wages. This ultimately motivated Jacob Mincer ten years later to develop the famous Mincer Equation, which attributed differences in cross-sectional wages to differentials in
schooling and experience.
In this framework, cognitive ability is seen as an endowment factor which differentiates marginal
productivity, helping to partially explain wage differentials. Cawley, Heckman and Vytlacil (2001)
estimate the magnitude of this effect using the NLSY survey, showing that a one standard deviation
increase in innate thinking ability is associated with between 10% and 15% higher wages. Both Cawley, Heckman and Vytlacil (2001) and Cunha, Heckman, Lochner and Masterov (2006) also suggest that, rather than being a fixed endowment, cognitive ability can evolve over a lifetime, dynamically affecting wages both through increased schooling and higher productivity. More recently, Hanushek, Schwerdt, Wiederhold, and Woessmann (2015) used data from the 2012 Programme for International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) survey to examine the relationship between numeracy and literacy abilities and wages. They find evidence of a positive relationship, however concede that the selection process of high-skilled individuals into higher levels of schooling may confound the true effect. Cawley, Heckman and Vytlacil (2001) find that cognitive ability, while statistically a significant predictor of income, explains only a small fraction of the variation in income, suggesting that other, unobserved factors may also play a key role in determining economic success. This then opens the discussion on the ability of other unobserved traits to affect economic outcomes of an individual. Mischel (1973) argued that personality traits are one fundamental factor in helping determine how an individual responds to stimulus in their environment in a consistent way. Thus we could reasonably expect personality traits to form a part of an individual's stock of human capital and to be associated with labour market outcomes.
Non-cognitive skills are notoriously difficult to measure, given the lack of consensus in the literature
on their definition and which proxies are most appropriate. One strategy that has received widespread
acceptance involves quantifying non-cognitive skills using the Five Factor Model (Goldberg, 1971; Costa and McCrae, 1985). The Five Factor model posits the existence of five distinct but not necessarily orthogonal personality characteristics, the Big Five personality traits. These characteristics, Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism, are traits that are theorised to help determine a personality that is consistent across time and situation. The Big Five are derived from well-established definitions in the psychology literature dating back to the seminal lexical work by Allport and Odbert (1936), and have seen applications in numerous economic studies attempting to find links between personality and learning, work, romantic and social outcomes. The traits are characterised as relative rigid over the life cycle, particularly by the age of 25-30 (Cobb-Clark and Schurer, 2011).1
Each of the Big Five dimensions in turn are made up of several smaller personality facets, which are
typically more easily measured using survey questions. John and Srivastava (1999), McCrae and John
(1992) and others outline the history of the Five Factor Model and in particular highlight which facets are associated with which personality dimensions. Openness to Experience, for example, is associated with concepts at the intersection of intelligence and ingenuity such as imagination, being artistic and
thoughtfulness. Neuroticism, on the other hand, is associated with facets such as anxiety, selfconsciousness, and vulnerability. Facets for the other three dimensions can be found in Appendix A.
While the Five Factor Model has its criticisms, its robustness, relative ease of interpretation and
applicability to survey questionnaires have made it an attractive option for economists interested in
studying personality. Numerous papers have attempted to tie these personality traits to economic
outcomes, including two early papers by Barrick and Mount (1991) and Tett, Jackson and Rothstein
(1991) who review work linking these characteristics to the labour market. Barrick et al. in particular find that conscientiousness has a strong positive correlation with job performance for all occupational groups, while the impact of the other four traits are differentiated by occupation type. Judge, Higgins, Thoresen Barrick and Murray (1999) use longitudinal data to find that conscientiousness and extraversion are positively related to various metrics of career success, while neuroticism and agreeableness are negatively correlated. Nyhus and Pons (2005), Mueller and Plug (2006), and Heineck and Anger (2010) unanimously find that conscientiousness is the most positively associated with and predictive of higher earnings, while agreeableness and neuroticism may be associated with negative returns. Nyhus and Pons find extraversion to have negative returns, while Mueller and Plug find this is true only for females.
Mueller and Plug are also the only to find a positive estimated return to openness to experience. Almlund (2011) affirm these main findings, suggesting that conscientiousness is the best overall predictor of job performance, though this correlation decreases with increased job complexity. Openness to experience and extraversion are found to be positively associated with job performance but only indirectly through education. A positive relationship between extraversion and education is not a consistent finding, however, as Goldberg (1998) and van Eijck and de Graaf (2004) find a slight negative relationship between educational attainment and neuroticism, extraversion and agreeableness.
Of course, using the Big Five dimensions is also not the only identification strategy used in the
literature. In a highly influential paper, Heckman and Rubinstein (2001) use enrolment in a General
Education Development (GED) program as a measure of non-cognitive skill and find that differences in social skills between GED and high school graduates explain a large proportion of the wage differential between the two groups. Heckman, Stixrud and Urzua (2006) used the Rotter Locus of Control Scale and the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale derived from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) as their preferred indicators, again finding evidence that non-cognitive skills strongly influence schooling decisions and wages. In another influential paper, Lindqvist and Vestman (2011) use an administrative dataset of Swedish military enlistees to derive a measure of personality as assessed by interviews with professional psychologists. Their results show that individuals who struggle with low earnings and unemployment are systematically characterised by low non-cognitive skill scores. Borghans, ter Weel and Weinberg (2014) use data from the NLSY to determine if differences in non-cognitive skills are able to predict wage differentials between minority and gender groups. In a related line of thinking, they look at whether returns to what they term ‘people skills’ have increased or decreased with time. They find that, between the 1970s and 1990s, non-cognitive skills have become increasingly important determinants of wages, which they attribute to an increased substitution of technology to perform tasks. This line of reasoning is affirmed by Weinberger (2014), Deming (2017) and Edin, Fredriksson, Nybom and Öckert (2017), who each find evidence of returns to non-cognitive skills increasing over time, and their growing importance to working in high-paying managerial occupations.
While the existing literature provides evidence for a wide array of OECD countries, to our
knowledge there is only one paper that examines the data specifically for Canada. Green and Riddell
(2003) use Canadian male respondents from the 1994 International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS) to
conclude that an individual's cognitive abilities are primarily established during formal schooling. In line with the literature, they also suggest that cognitive and non-cognitive skills affect earnings both
independently and through an interplay between them. Our work in this paper thus builds upon the
foundation established by Heckman, Green and Riddel and others that already exists in the literature. We contribute to the knowledge gap in the literature first by directly measuring both cognitive and noncognitive skills and focussing on how cognitive and non-cognitive skills are independently rewarded in the Canadian labour market. To our knowledge, we are also among the first to use the Longitudinal
International Survey of Adults (LISA) to analyse this question, which will allow us to offer further
empirical evidence to the literature from an under-studied OECD country. The advantages of using the LISA survey are two-fold. First, it offers some of the most recent data available for studying earnings and wage data, and will also allow for the robust examination of heterogeneity in cognitive and non-cognitive skill returns across a wide spectrum of Canadian workers.1
Aphantasics recalled significantly fewer object details than controls, and showed a reliance on verbal strategies; showed equally high spatial accuracy as controls, and draw fewer false objects than controls
Quantifying Aphantasia through drawing: Those without visual imagery show deficits in object but not spatial memory. Wilma A. Bainbridge, Zoë Pounder, Alison F. Eardley, Chris I. Baker. bioRxiv, Dec 2019. https://doi.org/10.1101/865576
Abstract: Congenital aphantasia is a recently identified experience defined by the inability to form voluntary visual imagery, with intact semantic memory and vision. Although understanding aphantasia promises insights into the nature of visual imagery, as a new focus of study, research is limited and has largely focused on small samples and subjective report. The current large-scale online study of aphantasics (N=63) and controls required participants to draw real-world scenes from memory, and copy them during a matched perceptual condition. Drawings were objectively quantified by 2,700 online scorers for object and spatial details. Aphantasics recalled significantly fewer object details than controls, and showed a reliance on verbal strategies. However, aphantasics showed equally high spatial accuracy as controls, and made significantly fewer memory errors, with no differences between groups in the perceptual condition. This object-specific memory impairment in aphantasics provides evidence for separate systems in memory that support object versus spatial details.
---
Aphantasics draw fewer false objects than controls
Finally, we quantified the amount of error in participants’ drawings from memory by group. AMT workers (N=5 per drawing) viewed a drawing and its corresponding image and wrote down all objects in the drawin gs that were not pre sent in the or iginal image (essentially quantifying false object memories). Significantly more memory drawings by controls contained false objects than drawings by aphantasics (control: 12 drawings, aphantasic: 3 drawings; ...); examples can be seen in Fig. 5. Similarly, significantly more objects drawn by controls were false alarms than those drawn by aphantasics ... This indicates that control participants were making more memory errors, even after controlling for the fewer number of objects drawn overall by aphantasics. Interestingly, all aphantasic errors (se e Fig. 5) were transpositions from another image and drawn in the cor rect location as the original object (a tree from the bedroom to the living room, a window from the kit chen to the l ivi ng room, and a ceiling fan from the kitchen to the bedroom). In contrast, seve ral fa lse memories from controls were objects that did no t exist across any image but instead appeared to be filled in based on the scene category (e.g., a piano in the living room, a dresser in the bedroom, logs in the living room). No perception drawings by participants from either group contained false objects.
Abstract: Congenital aphantasia is a recently identified experience defined by the inability to form voluntary visual imagery, with intact semantic memory and vision. Although understanding aphantasia promises insights into the nature of visual imagery, as a new focus of study, research is limited and has largely focused on small samples and subjective report. The current large-scale online study of aphantasics (N=63) and controls required participants to draw real-world scenes from memory, and copy them during a matched perceptual condition. Drawings were objectively quantified by 2,700 online scorers for object and spatial details. Aphantasics recalled significantly fewer object details than controls, and showed a reliance on verbal strategies. However, aphantasics showed equally high spatial accuracy as controls, and made significantly fewer memory errors, with no differences between groups in the perceptual condition. This object-specific memory impairment in aphantasics provides evidence for separate systems in memory that support object versus spatial details.
---
Aphantasics draw fewer false objects than controls
Finally, we quantified the amount of error in participants’ drawings from memory by group. AMT workers (N=5 per drawing) viewed a drawing and its corresponding image and wrote down all objects in the drawin gs that were not pre sent in the or iginal image (essentially quantifying false object memories). Significantly more memory drawings by controls contained false objects than drawings by aphantasics (control: 12 drawings, aphantasic: 3 drawings; ...); examples can be seen in Fig. 5. Similarly, significantly more objects drawn by controls were false alarms than those drawn by aphantasics ... This indicates that control participants were making more memory errors, even after controlling for the fewer number of objects drawn overall by aphantasics. Interestingly, all aphantasic errors (se e Fig. 5) were transpositions from another image and drawn in the cor rect location as the original object (a tree from the bedroom to the living room, a window from the kit chen to the l ivi ng room, and a ceiling fan from the kitchen to the bedroom). In contrast, seve ral fa lse memories from controls were objects that did no t exist across any image but instead appeared to be filled in based on the scene category (e.g., a piano in the living room, a dresser in the bedroom, logs in the living room). No perception drawings by participants from either group contained false objects.
People trust happy-sounding artificial agents more, even in the face of behavioral evidence of untrustworthiness
If your device could smile: People trust happy-sounding artificial agents more. Ilaria Torre, Jeremy Goslin, Laurence White. Computers in Human Behavior, December 9 2019. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2019.106215
Highlights
• Smiling can be heard in the voice without any visual cue.
• This ‘smiling voice’ elicits higher trusting behaviors than a neutral one.
• The higher trust persists even when the speaker is untrustworthy.
• This has implications for the design of voice-based artificial agents.
Abstract: While it is clear that artificial agents that are able to express emotions increase trust in Human-Machine Interaction, most studies looking at this effect concentrated on the expression of emotions through the visual channel, e.g. facial expressions. However, emotions can be expressed in the vocal channel too, yet the relationship between trust and vocally expressive agents has not yet been investigated. We use a game theory paradigm to examine the influence of smiling in the voice on trusting behavior towards a virtual agent, who responds either trustworthily or untrustworthily in an investment game. We found that a smiling voice increases trust, and that this effect persists over time, despite the accumulation of clear evidence regarding the agent’s level of trustworthiness in a negotiated interaction. Smiling voices maintain this benefit even in the face of behavioral evidence of untrustworthiness.
Keywords: TrustSmiling voiceVirtual agents
5. Discussion
Using an investment game paradigm, we found that positive vocal emotional expression – smiling voice – increases participants’ implicit trust attributions to virtual agents, compared with when agents speak with an emotionally neutral voice. As previously observed, the monetary returns of the agent also affected implicit trust, so that participants invested more money in the agent that was behaving generously. Critically, however, there was no interaction between behavior and vocal emotional expression: smiling voice enhanced trust regardless of the explicit behavioral cues that the virtual agent provided to its trustworthiness. The effect of smiling voice in the game, supported by our questionnaire findings, adds to previous studies on emotional expression, showing that the display of a positive emotion increases trust and likeability, even in the vocal channel (Scharlemann et al., 2001; Krumhuber et al., 2007; PentonVoak et al., 2006). Smiling was a consistent predictor of investments overall. That is to say, while participants’ investments were primarily driven by the virtual player’s generosity or meanness, they also overall invested more money in the smiling agents. This contrasts with the predictions of the EASI model (Van Kleef et al., 2010), according to which the display of a positive emotion in an incongruent context (such as the mean behavior condition) should elicit uncooperative behaviors. While Van Kleef et al. (2010) listed social dilemma tasks based on Prisoner’s Dilemma among possible competitive situations, it is possible that participants in an iterated investment game view it as an essentially cooperative task. Specifically,
while typical Prisoner’s Dilemma tasks involve a dichotomous choice (cooperate/defect), in our experiment, even in the mean condition, the agent was still returning a (small) amount of money, which might have been seen as a partially cooperative signal by participants. If participants are reluctant to give up on cooperation — as shown by the fact that investments increase in the second half of the game in the mean condition (Fig. 3) — they might be even more reluctant to give up on partners who seem to encourage them to cooperate, with their positive emotional expression. In Krumhuber et al. (2007), people explicitly and implicitly trusted smiling faces more than neutral faces, regardless of the sincerity of their smile, and genuine smiles were trusted more than fake smiles (Krumhuber et al., 2007). Similarly, Reed et al. (2012) found that people displaying either Duchenne or non-Duchenne smiles were more likely to cooperate in a one-shot investment game (Reed et al., 2012). Thus, displaying an emotion, even a feigned one, might be preferred to not displaying any emotion at all, hence the increased investments to the mean smiling agents. Additionally, participants might have felt more positive emotions themselves upon hearing a smiling agent. In fact, emotional expressions can evoke affective reactions in observers (Geday et al., 2003), which may subsequently influence their behavior (Hatfield et al., 1994), and this ‘emotional contagion’ might be transmitted through the auditory channel as well. If this is the case, participants might have trusted the smiling agents more because feeling a positive emotion themselves might have prompted them to behave in a cooperative manner (Schug et al., 2010; Mieth et al., 2016). These results show similarities with Tsankova et al. (2015), who found that people rated trustworthy faces and voices as happier (Tsankova et al., 2015). Although they addressed the issue from the opposite direction – "Are trustworthy stimuli perceived as happier?" rather than "Are happy stimuli perceived as trustworthy?" – taken together, the studies suggest a bidirectionality in the perception of trustworthiness and cues to positive emotion, congruent with a ’halo effect’ of positive traits (Lau, 1982). The smiling-voice effect suggests that, in the absence of visual information, the audio equivalent of a Duchenne smile might act as a relative ‘honest signal’ of cooperation. As mentioned before, Duchenne smiles are smiles describing genuine happiness or amusement (Ekman & Friesen, 1982). Traditionally, in the visual domain they can be distinguished from other types of smiles because they involve the contraction of the ‘Orbicularis Oculi’ muscle, which is a movement that is notoriously more difficult to fake (Ekman & Friesen, 1982; Schug et al., 2010). Obviously, in the auditory channel it is not possible to detect a genuine smiling voice from this muscular movement. However, it is possible that a smiling voice which sounds happy might be the auditory equivalent of a Duchenne smile. As participants indicated that the smiling voices used in this study did sound happy, it is possible that the expression of happiness and amusement in the speech signal led listeners to believe that the agent could be trusted. A limitation of this study is that no video recordings were taken during the audio recordings of the speakers used in this experiment. This means that, while every effort was was made to ensure consistency in the smile production, it is possible that our speakers might have produced different kinds of smiles. As is well known in emotion theory, smiles can convey many different meanings, and several different facial expressions of smiles are known (e.g. Rychlowska et al., 2017; Keltner, 1995). However, much of the research on the effect of different types of smiles on person perception and decision making has concentrated on the difference between polite (non-Duchenne) and genuine (Duchenne) smiles (e.g. Chu et al., 2019; Krumhuber et al., 2007; Reed et al., 2012). Traditionally, these two are characterised by different muscle activation, with non-Duchenne smiles only activating the Zygomaticus Major muscle, and Duchenne smiles also activating the Orbicularis Oculi muscle (Frank et al., 1993). However, recent studies have suggested that Orbicularis Oculi activation in Duchenne smiles might actually be a by-product of the Zygomaticus Major activation (Girard et al., 2019; Krumhuber & Manstead, 2009). Also, the acoustics of smiling are only affected by activation of the Zygomaticus Major muscle, which contributes to vocal tract shape, but not of Orbicularis Oculi. Following past research that Orbicularis Oculi activation is the only thing that distinguishes Duchenne from non-Duchenne smiles, we would still expect both smiles to sound the same, as the Zygomaticus Major activation would be the same. Still, research on the acoustic characteristics of different types of smiles is lacking. Drahota et al. (2008-04) obtained three different smiling expressions – Duchenne smiles, nonDuchenne smiles, and suppressed smiles – as well as a neutral baseline, from English speakers, and asked participants to correctly identify these four expressions. Participants were only able to reliably distinguish Duchenne smiles from non-smiles, but the majority of the other smile types were classified as non-smiles. Furthermore, they only performed pairwise comparisons between a smile type and a non-smile, but they did not compare differences in identification between two different smile types. Even though they only had 11 participants, which warrants for a much-needed replication of this study, this finding suggests that people might only be able to acoustically discriminate between two categories, smile and non-smile. Similar results were obtained in studies using different types of visual smiles in decision-making tasks. Previous work using cooperative games with Duchenne and non-Duchenne (facial) smiles have shown that people made the same decisions regardless of the type of smile (Reed et al., 2012; Krumhuber et al., 2007). This suggests that people might react according to a broad, dichotomous smile category (smile vs. non-smile), even though the smiles in the experiment stimuli were of different qualities. This corroborates previous findings in nonconscious mimicry, whereby facial EMG recordings were different when viewing a face with a Duchenne smile and a neutral expression, but not when viewing a face with a non-Duchenne smile and a neutral expression (Surakka & Hietanen, 1998). This contrasts with Chu et al. (2019), who
found that participants cooperated more with a confederate expressing a non-Duchenne smile, than with a confederate expressing a Duchenne smile, following a breach of trust. However, in this study the confederate only showed the smiling expression after the cooperate/defect decision was made, whereas in Reed et al. (2012); Krumhuber et al. (2007), as well as in the current study, the smiling expression was displayed before the decision was made. As Chu et al. (2019) point out, this factor might have influenced the decisions and could explain the different behaviors. For example, participants might interpret an emotional expression – such as a smile – after a decision as being an appraisal of that decision. People might put more cognitive effort into understanding this appraisal, as this is essential for shaping future interactions, hence the more accurate discrimination of different smile types. As de Melo et al. (2015, 2013) suggest, a happy expression following the decision to cooperate conveys a different meaning than a happy expression following the decision to defect. This is also consistent with the EASI model (Van Kleef et al., 2010). On the other hand, a happy expression shown before the decision to cooperate / defect might rather convey some information about the emotional state of the person in question, and might be kept independent from that person’s actual behavior in the game. Also, counterparts’ smiles may lead people to anticipate positive social outcomes (Kringelbach & Rolls, 2003). Thus, it seems that the timing of emotional expression in relation to the behavior of interest drastically changes the interpretation of that, and future, behaviors. It would be very interesting to replicate the current experiment with different smiling voices, shown before and after the action is taken in the game. Also, if a similar study were to be replicated, the actual facial expression of the speakers could be recorded in order to determine whether different facial expressions correspond to different auditory smiles, both in terms of objective measures (acoustics) and in terms of perception and behavior correlates in the game. So far, we have compared our results with previous studies that used facial smiles. These comparisons are necessary, as at the time of writing there are virtually no studies that have employed trust games with expressive voices. However, emotional expressions are naturally multimodal, and it is possible that a certain emotion expressed only in the voice might elicit different behaviors than if it were expressed only in the face, or in a voice + face combination. In fact, previous research suggested that an ’Emotional McGurk Effect’ might be at play (Fagel, 2006; Mower et al., 2009; Pourtois et al., 2005). Thus, our current results can only inform the design of voice-based artificial agents, but should not be extended to the design of embodied agents. The results from questionnaires validate the behavioral measures obtained from the investment game. We found that people consistently gave higher ratings of trustworthiness and liking to the smiling agents, and to the agents that behaved generously in the game. Again, the lack of interactions between smiling and behavior suggests that the smiling voice mitigates negative reactions following an untrustworthy behavior. We also found some evidence that individual differences among participants might play a role in trusting behavior, as shown by the 3-way interaction between behavior, game turn, and gender (Section 4.1). The effect of gender on trusting and trustworthiness has been widely studied using game theoretic paradigms, but so far there has been no definite conclusion on whether women trust more / are more trustworthy than men, or vice versa (e.g. Chaudhuri et al., 2013; Bonein & Serra, 2009; Slonim & Guillen, 2010). Our results support previous findings showing that we tend to trust people of the opposite gender more (Slonim & Guillen, 2010), as men in our experiment invested more money than women to the virtual agents, which had a female voice. They also support findings that men trust more than women in general (Chaudhuri & Gangadharan, 2007). However, these conclusions only hold insofar as the generous behavior condition is concerned, as in the mean condition men actually trusted the virtual agent less than women did. A similar behavior was previously observed in Haselhuhn et al. (2015), who found that men showed less trust following a trust breach on the trustee’s part (Haselhuhn et al., 2015). Also, Torre et al. (2018) showed that people who formed a first impression of trustworthiness of a virtual agent punished it when the agent behaved in an untrustworthy manner, by investing less money than to an agent whose first impression was lower. Thus, a ’congruency effect’ might be at play here: our male participants might have formed a first impression of trustworthiness of the female agents (Slonim & Guillen, 2010); when this first impression was congruent with the observed behavior (in the generous condition), the agent received more monetary investments from the male participants. On the other hand, when the first impression was incongruent with the observed behavior (mean condition), it received less (cf. Torre et al., 2018). Participants’ age did not have an effect on the behavioral results from the investment game, but it did influence participants’ explicit ratings of the artificial agents’ trustworthiness, with older people indicating lower trust. This is consistent with the idea that younger people trust technology more, perhaps due to a higher degree of familiarity (e.g. Scopelliti et al., 2005; Giuliani et al., 2005; Czaja & Sharit, 1998). However, we did not match participants’ age – or gender– systematically, so more research is needed on the role of individual differences on trust towards voice-based artificial agents. Finally, speaker identity was varied randomly rather than wholly systematically in our experimental design, and so we included speaker identity as a random rather than fixed effect in our analyses. It is possible, indeed likely, that participants’ trust attributions were influenced by the virtual agents’ unique vocal profiles as well as their behavior and smiling status. In fact, Fig. 7 shows that people invested more money with speaker B2, followed by speakers R1, R2, and B1 (mean overall investments = £5.46, £4.76, £4.11, £3.56, respectively). This is not unexpected: voices carry a wide variety of information about the speaker, such as gender, accent, age, emotional state, socioeconomic background, etc., and all this information is implicitly used by listeners to
form an initial impression of the speaker; a short exposure to someone’s voice is enough to determine if that someone can be trusted (McAleer et al., 2014). For example, in the free-text comments explaining the liking rating to each voice, one participant remarked that smiling speaker B2 “varied in tone and was much more interesting to listen to” and neutral speaker B2 was “calm and convincing”; on the other hand, smiling speaker R2 was “mellow and monotone"and neutral speaker R2 “sounded bored and insincere”. Smiling speaker B1 was “quite annoying” and the neutral version “didn’t seem trustworthy or reassuring”, “sounded too neutral” and even “too fake”. Thus, when designing a voice for an artificial agent, it is important to also keep in mind what effect its specific vocal imprint will have on the user (see als McGinn & Torre, 2019). Nevertheless, any potential between-speaker differences in the current experiment were nested within the effect of smiling voice, as all speakers were recorded in both smiling and neutral conditions
Highlights
• Smiling can be heard in the voice without any visual cue.
• This ‘smiling voice’ elicits higher trusting behaviors than a neutral one.
• The higher trust persists even when the speaker is untrustworthy.
• This has implications for the design of voice-based artificial agents.
Abstract: While it is clear that artificial agents that are able to express emotions increase trust in Human-Machine Interaction, most studies looking at this effect concentrated on the expression of emotions through the visual channel, e.g. facial expressions. However, emotions can be expressed in the vocal channel too, yet the relationship between trust and vocally expressive agents has not yet been investigated. We use a game theory paradigm to examine the influence of smiling in the voice on trusting behavior towards a virtual agent, who responds either trustworthily or untrustworthily in an investment game. We found that a smiling voice increases trust, and that this effect persists over time, despite the accumulation of clear evidence regarding the agent’s level of trustworthiness in a negotiated interaction. Smiling voices maintain this benefit even in the face of behavioral evidence of untrustworthiness.
Keywords: TrustSmiling voiceVirtual agents
5. Discussion
Using an investment game paradigm, we found that positive vocal emotional expression – smiling voice – increases participants’ implicit trust attributions to virtual agents, compared with when agents speak with an emotionally neutral voice. As previously observed, the monetary returns of the agent also affected implicit trust, so that participants invested more money in the agent that was behaving generously. Critically, however, there was no interaction between behavior and vocal emotional expression: smiling voice enhanced trust regardless of the explicit behavioral cues that the virtual agent provided to its trustworthiness. The effect of smiling voice in the game, supported by our questionnaire findings, adds to previous studies on emotional expression, showing that the display of a positive emotion increases trust and likeability, even in the vocal channel (Scharlemann et al., 2001; Krumhuber et al., 2007; PentonVoak et al., 2006). Smiling was a consistent predictor of investments overall. That is to say, while participants’ investments were primarily driven by the virtual player’s generosity or meanness, they also overall invested more money in the smiling agents. This contrasts with the predictions of the EASI model (Van Kleef et al., 2010), according to which the display of a positive emotion in an incongruent context (such as the mean behavior condition) should elicit uncooperative behaviors. While Van Kleef et al. (2010) listed social dilemma tasks based on Prisoner’s Dilemma among possible competitive situations, it is possible that participants in an iterated investment game view it as an essentially cooperative task. Specifically,
while typical Prisoner’s Dilemma tasks involve a dichotomous choice (cooperate/defect), in our experiment, even in the mean condition, the agent was still returning a (small) amount of money, which might have been seen as a partially cooperative signal by participants. If participants are reluctant to give up on cooperation — as shown by the fact that investments increase in the second half of the game in the mean condition (Fig. 3) — they might be even more reluctant to give up on partners who seem to encourage them to cooperate, with their positive emotional expression. In Krumhuber et al. (2007), people explicitly and implicitly trusted smiling faces more than neutral faces, regardless of the sincerity of their smile, and genuine smiles were trusted more than fake smiles (Krumhuber et al., 2007). Similarly, Reed et al. (2012) found that people displaying either Duchenne or non-Duchenne smiles were more likely to cooperate in a one-shot investment game (Reed et al., 2012). Thus, displaying an emotion, even a feigned one, might be preferred to not displaying any emotion at all, hence the increased investments to the mean smiling agents. Additionally, participants might have felt more positive emotions themselves upon hearing a smiling agent. In fact, emotional expressions can evoke affective reactions in observers (Geday et al., 2003), which may subsequently influence their behavior (Hatfield et al., 1994), and this ‘emotional contagion’ might be transmitted through the auditory channel as well. If this is the case, participants might have trusted the smiling agents more because feeling a positive emotion themselves might have prompted them to behave in a cooperative manner (Schug et al., 2010; Mieth et al., 2016). These results show similarities with Tsankova et al. (2015), who found that people rated trustworthy faces and voices as happier (Tsankova et al., 2015). Although they addressed the issue from the opposite direction – "Are trustworthy stimuli perceived as happier?" rather than "Are happy stimuli perceived as trustworthy?" – taken together, the studies suggest a bidirectionality in the perception of trustworthiness and cues to positive emotion, congruent with a ’halo effect’ of positive traits (Lau, 1982). The smiling-voice effect suggests that, in the absence of visual information, the audio equivalent of a Duchenne smile might act as a relative ‘honest signal’ of cooperation. As mentioned before, Duchenne smiles are smiles describing genuine happiness or amusement (Ekman & Friesen, 1982). Traditionally, in the visual domain they can be distinguished from other types of smiles because they involve the contraction of the ‘Orbicularis Oculi’ muscle, which is a movement that is notoriously more difficult to fake (Ekman & Friesen, 1982; Schug et al., 2010). Obviously, in the auditory channel it is not possible to detect a genuine smiling voice from this muscular movement. However, it is possible that a smiling voice which sounds happy might be the auditory equivalent of a Duchenne smile. As participants indicated that the smiling voices used in this study did sound happy, it is possible that the expression of happiness and amusement in the speech signal led listeners to believe that the agent could be trusted. A limitation of this study is that no video recordings were taken during the audio recordings of the speakers used in this experiment. This means that, while every effort was was made to ensure consistency in the smile production, it is possible that our speakers might have produced different kinds of smiles. As is well known in emotion theory, smiles can convey many different meanings, and several different facial expressions of smiles are known (e.g. Rychlowska et al., 2017; Keltner, 1995). However, much of the research on the effect of different types of smiles on person perception and decision making has concentrated on the difference between polite (non-Duchenne) and genuine (Duchenne) smiles (e.g. Chu et al., 2019; Krumhuber et al., 2007; Reed et al., 2012). Traditionally, these two are characterised by different muscle activation, with non-Duchenne smiles only activating the Zygomaticus Major muscle, and Duchenne smiles also activating the Orbicularis Oculi muscle (Frank et al., 1993). However, recent studies have suggested that Orbicularis Oculi activation in Duchenne smiles might actually be a by-product of the Zygomaticus Major activation (Girard et al., 2019; Krumhuber & Manstead, 2009). Also, the acoustics of smiling are only affected by activation of the Zygomaticus Major muscle, which contributes to vocal tract shape, but not of Orbicularis Oculi. Following past research that Orbicularis Oculi activation is the only thing that distinguishes Duchenne from non-Duchenne smiles, we would still expect both smiles to sound the same, as the Zygomaticus Major activation would be the same. Still, research on the acoustic characteristics of different types of smiles is lacking. Drahota et al. (2008-04) obtained three different smiling expressions – Duchenne smiles, nonDuchenne smiles, and suppressed smiles – as well as a neutral baseline, from English speakers, and asked participants to correctly identify these four expressions. Participants were only able to reliably distinguish Duchenne smiles from non-smiles, but the majority of the other smile types were classified as non-smiles. Furthermore, they only performed pairwise comparisons between a smile type and a non-smile, but they did not compare differences in identification between two different smile types. Even though they only had 11 participants, which warrants for a much-needed replication of this study, this finding suggests that people might only be able to acoustically discriminate between two categories, smile and non-smile. Similar results were obtained in studies using different types of visual smiles in decision-making tasks. Previous work using cooperative games with Duchenne and non-Duchenne (facial) smiles have shown that people made the same decisions regardless of the type of smile (Reed et al., 2012; Krumhuber et al., 2007). This suggests that people might react according to a broad, dichotomous smile category (smile vs. non-smile), even though the smiles in the experiment stimuli were of different qualities. This corroborates previous findings in nonconscious mimicry, whereby facial EMG recordings were different when viewing a face with a Duchenne smile and a neutral expression, but not when viewing a face with a non-Duchenne smile and a neutral expression (Surakka & Hietanen, 1998). This contrasts with Chu et al. (2019), who
found that participants cooperated more with a confederate expressing a non-Duchenne smile, than with a confederate expressing a Duchenne smile, following a breach of trust. However, in this study the confederate only showed the smiling expression after the cooperate/defect decision was made, whereas in Reed et al. (2012); Krumhuber et al. (2007), as well as in the current study, the smiling expression was displayed before the decision was made. As Chu et al. (2019) point out, this factor might have influenced the decisions and could explain the different behaviors. For example, participants might interpret an emotional expression – such as a smile – after a decision as being an appraisal of that decision. People might put more cognitive effort into understanding this appraisal, as this is essential for shaping future interactions, hence the more accurate discrimination of different smile types. As de Melo et al. (2015, 2013) suggest, a happy expression following the decision to cooperate conveys a different meaning than a happy expression following the decision to defect. This is also consistent with the EASI model (Van Kleef et al., 2010). On the other hand, a happy expression shown before the decision to cooperate / defect might rather convey some information about the emotional state of the person in question, and might be kept independent from that person’s actual behavior in the game. Also, counterparts’ smiles may lead people to anticipate positive social outcomes (Kringelbach & Rolls, 2003). Thus, it seems that the timing of emotional expression in relation to the behavior of interest drastically changes the interpretation of that, and future, behaviors. It would be very interesting to replicate the current experiment with different smiling voices, shown before and after the action is taken in the game. Also, if a similar study were to be replicated, the actual facial expression of the speakers could be recorded in order to determine whether different facial expressions correspond to different auditory smiles, both in terms of objective measures (acoustics) and in terms of perception and behavior correlates in the game. So far, we have compared our results with previous studies that used facial smiles. These comparisons are necessary, as at the time of writing there are virtually no studies that have employed trust games with expressive voices. However, emotional expressions are naturally multimodal, and it is possible that a certain emotion expressed only in the voice might elicit different behaviors than if it were expressed only in the face, or in a voice + face combination. In fact, previous research suggested that an ’Emotional McGurk Effect’ might be at play (Fagel, 2006; Mower et al., 2009; Pourtois et al., 2005). Thus, our current results can only inform the design of voice-based artificial agents, but should not be extended to the design of embodied agents. The results from questionnaires validate the behavioral measures obtained from the investment game. We found that people consistently gave higher ratings of trustworthiness and liking to the smiling agents, and to the agents that behaved generously in the game. Again, the lack of interactions between smiling and behavior suggests that the smiling voice mitigates negative reactions following an untrustworthy behavior. We also found some evidence that individual differences among participants might play a role in trusting behavior, as shown by the 3-way interaction between behavior, game turn, and gender (Section 4.1). The effect of gender on trusting and trustworthiness has been widely studied using game theoretic paradigms, but so far there has been no definite conclusion on whether women trust more / are more trustworthy than men, or vice versa (e.g. Chaudhuri et al., 2013; Bonein & Serra, 2009; Slonim & Guillen, 2010). Our results support previous findings showing that we tend to trust people of the opposite gender more (Slonim & Guillen, 2010), as men in our experiment invested more money than women to the virtual agents, which had a female voice. They also support findings that men trust more than women in general (Chaudhuri & Gangadharan, 2007). However, these conclusions only hold insofar as the generous behavior condition is concerned, as in the mean condition men actually trusted the virtual agent less than women did. A similar behavior was previously observed in Haselhuhn et al. (2015), who found that men showed less trust following a trust breach on the trustee’s part (Haselhuhn et al., 2015). Also, Torre et al. (2018) showed that people who formed a first impression of trustworthiness of a virtual agent punished it when the agent behaved in an untrustworthy manner, by investing less money than to an agent whose first impression was lower. Thus, a ’congruency effect’ might be at play here: our male participants might have formed a first impression of trustworthiness of the female agents (Slonim & Guillen, 2010); when this first impression was congruent with the observed behavior (in the generous condition), the agent received more monetary investments from the male participants. On the other hand, when the first impression was incongruent with the observed behavior (mean condition), it received less (cf. Torre et al., 2018). Participants’ age did not have an effect on the behavioral results from the investment game, but it did influence participants’ explicit ratings of the artificial agents’ trustworthiness, with older people indicating lower trust. This is consistent with the idea that younger people trust technology more, perhaps due to a higher degree of familiarity (e.g. Scopelliti et al., 2005; Giuliani et al., 2005; Czaja & Sharit, 1998). However, we did not match participants’ age – or gender– systematically, so more research is needed on the role of individual differences on trust towards voice-based artificial agents. Finally, speaker identity was varied randomly rather than wholly systematically in our experimental design, and so we included speaker identity as a random rather than fixed effect in our analyses. It is possible, indeed likely, that participants’ trust attributions were influenced by the virtual agents’ unique vocal profiles as well as their behavior and smiling status. In fact, Fig. 7 shows that people invested more money with speaker B2, followed by speakers R1, R2, and B1 (mean overall investments = £5.46, £4.76, £4.11, £3.56, respectively). This is not unexpected: voices carry a wide variety of information about the speaker, such as gender, accent, age, emotional state, socioeconomic background, etc., and all this information is implicitly used by listeners to
form an initial impression of the speaker; a short exposure to someone’s voice is enough to determine if that someone can be trusted (McAleer et al., 2014). For example, in the free-text comments explaining the liking rating to each voice, one participant remarked that smiling speaker B2 “varied in tone and was much more interesting to listen to” and neutral speaker B2 was “calm and convincing”; on the other hand, smiling speaker R2 was “mellow and monotone"and neutral speaker R2 “sounded bored and insincere”. Smiling speaker B1 was “quite annoying” and the neutral version “didn’t seem trustworthy or reassuring”, “sounded too neutral” and even “too fake”. Thus, when designing a voice for an artificial agent, it is important to also keep in mind what effect its specific vocal imprint will have on the user (see als McGinn & Torre, 2019). Nevertheless, any potential between-speaker differences in the current experiment were nested within the effect of smiling voice, as all speakers were recorded in both smiling and neutral conditions
Investigating the generation and spread of numerical misinformation in a manner consistent with our schemata
Jason C Coronel, Shannon Poulsen, Matthew D Sweitzer, Investigating the generation and spread of numerical misinformation: A combined eye movement monitoring and social transmission approach, Human Communication Research, Dec 2019, hqz012, https://doi.org/10.1093/hcr/hqz012
Abstract: Numerical facts play a prominent role in public discourse, but individuals often provide incorrect estimates of policy-relevant numerical quantities (e.g., the number of immigrants in the country). Across two studies, we examined the role of schemas in the creation of numerical misinformation, and how misinformation can spread via person-to-person communication. In our first study, we combined eye movement monitoring and behavioral methods to examine how schemas distorted what people remembered about policy-relevant numerical information. Then, in a second study, we examined the consequences of these memory distortions via the social transmission of numerical information, using the serial reproduction paradigm. We found that individuals misremembered numerical information in a manner consistent with their schemas, and that person-to-person transmission can exacerbate these memory errors. Our studies highlight the mechanisms supporting the generation and spread of numerical misinformation and demonstrate the utility of a multi-method approach in the study of misinformation.
Popular version: You create your own false information, study finds - People misremember numerical facts to fit their biases. Ohio State Univ, Dec 9 2019. https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2019-12/osu-ycy120619.php (h/t Reddit u/Lightfiend)
General discussion
Across Studies 1 and 2, we examined instances in which individuals were exposed to accurate numerical information from an external source, but schemas led them to misremember information. Participants in Study 1 directed a greater amount of attention to numerical information when their referent order was schema inconsistent than when that order was schema consistent, likely because it violated their expectations (Loftus & Mackworth, 1978; Underwood & Foulsham, 2006). However, greater attention to the schema-inconsistent paragraphs did not translate into better memory accuracy, as participants’ pairwise gist memories were less accurate for schema-inconsistent than -consistent information. According to misremembering models, this is because inconsistent information was misremembered in a way that aligned with people’s schemas. In Studies 2a and 2b, we showed that these memory distortions can have consequences beyond the individual that generated them, once person-to-person transmission processes are introduced. We examined instances in which factually accurate information was inconsistent with people’s schematic expectations. Over the course of re-transmission in the serial reproduction paradigm, numerical information was transformed into factually inaccurate but schema-consistent information. These results were obtained across two different samples with two distinct memory tasks. Given our findings, our study has several substantive and methodological contributions. First, our results support misremembering models. Notably, these models predict (and we found evidence here) that greater attention to information will not necessarily lead to better memory for that information. This prediction is in stark contrast to some views in the message-processing literature, which subscribe to the prediction of attention-memory models and specify a positive relationship between attention and memory (Jeong & Hwang, 2016; Kim & Southwell, 2017; Segijn et al., 2017; Young et al., 2018). Second, our results point to the important conceptual distinction between internal and external sources of misinformation (Davis & Loftus, 2007). Importantly, this framework suggests that even if all external sources in the environment are disseminating factually accurate numerical information, individuals can still selfgenerate misinformation and, potentially, spread it from person to person. In addition, although we classified schema-based memory distortions as internal sources of information, the individual possessing inaccurate memories can turn into an external source when he or she passes the information to another person. Third, our results highlight how person-to-person transmission processes can lead to cumulative distortions in numerical information that go beyond the biases of individuals who are positioned earlier in communication chains. This suggests that studies which do not take person-to-person communication processes into account may underestimate the strength of schemas in distorting numerical information. Furthermore, although our focus here was the manner in which person-to-person transmission can distort information, future work should examine the extent to which schemas can preserve the transmission of factually accurate, numerical relationships. Indeed, we observed such a pattern in Studies 2a and 2b for our schemaconsistent issues.
Finally, our studies illustrate the value of a multi-method approach. We used eyemovement monitoring to gain unique leverage on the cognitive mechanisms supporting the creation of schema-based numerical misinformation (for other applications of eye-tracking technology in communication research, see King, Bol, Cummins, & John, 2019). Then, we used the serial reproduction paradigm to investigate the consequences of these cognitive biases by examining the creation and transmission of schema-based, numerical misinformation. As with all studies, our studies have certain limitations and caution is warranted in terms of generalizing some of the study’s findings. Study 1 used a chin-rest eye tracker that restricted participants’ ability to move their heads. Although chin-rest eye trackers generally provide excellent spatial resolution, given that the eyes maintain a constant distance from the screen, individuals in their everyday lives often consume news information without restrictions on their head movements. In our studies, we used short paragraphs. Longer texts that discuss why certain numerical relationships exist (e.g., explanations as to why the number of Mexican immigrants has decreased) may increase the likelihood that people remember schema-inconsistent, numerical information, if individuals also encode explanations for the numerical relationships. We also did not manipulate issue importance. Given related work on the influence of motivated reasoning and issue importance on attitudes in other domains of politics (Slothuus & de Vreese, 2010), individuals may be more likely to misremember schema-inconsistent information for issues that are high in personal importance. Importantly, we also did not measure each of our participant’s specific schemas for what would be considered consistent or inconsistent information for each issue. We assumed, based on the findings from the pre-tests, that most individuals in our studies would possess our expected schemas. However, it is likely that there were individual differences in people’s schematic representations or levels of motivation for maintaining desired, schema-consistent information (Tappin, van der Leer, & McKay, 2017). Future work should investigate the individual differences that can moderate the effects of schema consistency on memory for policy-relevant, numerical facts.14 In addition, our version of the serial reproduction paradigm does not reflect all the complexities involved in actual social transmission. Actual social transmission is influenced by many interpersonal and situational factors. We used the serial reproduction paradigm to look specifically at the critical role of memory for numerical information. Memory is arguably an important component of social transmission, given that individuals cannot transmit information to others if they do not possess memory of that information. However, the serial reproduction paradigm can be adapted to reflect elements of actual social transmission (e.g., two-way discussion, receiving information from multiple partners, evaluating information from a friend versus a stranger, etc.; for a review and examples, see Mesoudi &Whiten, 2008), which future work can explore. For example, source characteristics, such as knowledgeable individuals or in-group membership, have been shown to influence people’s memory for, and attitudes towards, the socially transmitted information (Carlson, 2019; Lee, Gelfand, & Kashima, 2014).
In summary, our studies show the importance of memory biases and the role of re-transmission in the reinforcement and spread of numerical misinformation. Our results demonstrate how schemas, in conjunction with re-transmission, can generate inaccurate information, facilitate the spread of inaccurate information from person to person, and exacerbate these errors through cumulative distortion, resulting from serial reproduction. Our findings are relevant to important questions about whether individuals possess an accurate understanding of the political world. Policy-relevant numerical facts play a prominent role in public discourse, as politicians, journalists, and interest groups use them as evidence to advocate for, or fight against, certain political causes. The ability of individuals to possess accurate representations of numerical facts may help protect them from the various forms of deceptive persuasion they encounter in their everyday lives.
Abstract: Numerical facts play a prominent role in public discourse, but individuals often provide incorrect estimates of policy-relevant numerical quantities (e.g., the number of immigrants in the country). Across two studies, we examined the role of schemas in the creation of numerical misinformation, and how misinformation can spread via person-to-person communication. In our first study, we combined eye movement monitoring and behavioral methods to examine how schemas distorted what people remembered about policy-relevant numerical information. Then, in a second study, we examined the consequences of these memory distortions via the social transmission of numerical information, using the serial reproduction paradigm. We found that individuals misremembered numerical information in a manner consistent with their schemas, and that person-to-person transmission can exacerbate these memory errors. Our studies highlight the mechanisms supporting the generation and spread of numerical misinformation and demonstrate the utility of a multi-method approach in the study of misinformation.
Popular version: You create your own false information, study finds - People misremember numerical facts to fit their biases. Ohio State Univ, Dec 9 2019. https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2019-12/osu-ycy120619.php (h/t Reddit u/Lightfiend)
General discussion
Across Studies 1 and 2, we examined instances in which individuals were exposed to accurate numerical information from an external source, but schemas led them to misremember information. Participants in Study 1 directed a greater amount of attention to numerical information when their referent order was schema inconsistent than when that order was schema consistent, likely because it violated their expectations (Loftus & Mackworth, 1978; Underwood & Foulsham, 2006). However, greater attention to the schema-inconsistent paragraphs did not translate into better memory accuracy, as participants’ pairwise gist memories were less accurate for schema-inconsistent than -consistent information. According to misremembering models, this is because inconsistent information was misremembered in a way that aligned with people’s schemas. In Studies 2a and 2b, we showed that these memory distortions can have consequences beyond the individual that generated them, once person-to-person transmission processes are introduced. We examined instances in which factually accurate information was inconsistent with people’s schematic expectations. Over the course of re-transmission in the serial reproduction paradigm, numerical information was transformed into factually inaccurate but schema-consistent information. These results were obtained across two different samples with two distinct memory tasks. Given our findings, our study has several substantive and methodological contributions. First, our results support misremembering models. Notably, these models predict (and we found evidence here) that greater attention to information will not necessarily lead to better memory for that information. This prediction is in stark contrast to some views in the message-processing literature, which subscribe to the prediction of attention-memory models and specify a positive relationship between attention and memory (Jeong & Hwang, 2016; Kim & Southwell, 2017; Segijn et al., 2017; Young et al., 2018). Second, our results point to the important conceptual distinction between internal and external sources of misinformation (Davis & Loftus, 2007). Importantly, this framework suggests that even if all external sources in the environment are disseminating factually accurate numerical information, individuals can still selfgenerate misinformation and, potentially, spread it from person to person. In addition, although we classified schema-based memory distortions as internal sources of information, the individual possessing inaccurate memories can turn into an external source when he or she passes the information to another person. Third, our results highlight how person-to-person transmission processes can lead to cumulative distortions in numerical information that go beyond the biases of individuals who are positioned earlier in communication chains. This suggests that studies which do not take person-to-person communication processes into account may underestimate the strength of schemas in distorting numerical information. Furthermore, although our focus here was the manner in which person-to-person transmission can distort information, future work should examine the extent to which schemas can preserve the transmission of factually accurate, numerical relationships. Indeed, we observed such a pattern in Studies 2a and 2b for our schemaconsistent issues.
Finally, our studies illustrate the value of a multi-method approach. We used eyemovement monitoring to gain unique leverage on the cognitive mechanisms supporting the creation of schema-based numerical misinformation (for other applications of eye-tracking technology in communication research, see King, Bol, Cummins, & John, 2019). Then, we used the serial reproduction paradigm to investigate the consequences of these cognitive biases by examining the creation and transmission of schema-based, numerical misinformation. As with all studies, our studies have certain limitations and caution is warranted in terms of generalizing some of the study’s findings. Study 1 used a chin-rest eye tracker that restricted participants’ ability to move their heads. Although chin-rest eye trackers generally provide excellent spatial resolution, given that the eyes maintain a constant distance from the screen, individuals in their everyday lives often consume news information without restrictions on their head movements. In our studies, we used short paragraphs. Longer texts that discuss why certain numerical relationships exist (e.g., explanations as to why the number of Mexican immigrants has decreased) may increase the likelihood that people remember schema-inconsistent, numerical information, if individuals also encode explanations for the numerical relationships. We also did not manipulate issue importance. Given related work on the influence of motivated reasoning and issue importance on attitudes in other domains of politics (Slothuus & de Vreese, 2010), individuals may be more likely to misremember schema-inconsistent information for issues that are high in personal importance. Importantly, we also did not measure each of our participant’s specific schemas for what would be considered consistent or inconsistent information for each issue. We assumed, based on the findings from the pre-tests, that most individuals in our studies would possess our expected schemas. However, it is likely that there were individual differences in people’s schematic representations or levels of motivation for maintaining desired, schema-consistent information (Tappin, van der Leer, & McKay, 2017). Future work should investigate the individual differences that can moderate the effects of schema consistency on memory for policy-relevant, numerical facts.14 In addition, our version of the serial reproduction paradigm does not reflect all the complexities involved in actual social transmission. Actual social transmission is influenced by many interpersonal and situational factors. We used the serial reproduction paradigm to look specifically at the critical role of memory for numerical information. Memory is arguably an important component of social transmission, given that individuals cannot transmit information to others if they do not possess memory of that information. However, the serial reproduction paradigm can be adapted to reflect elements of actual social transmission (e.g., two-way discussion, receiving information from multiple partners, evaluating information from a friend versus a stranger, etc.; for a review and examples, see Mesoudi &Whiten, 2008), which future work can explore. For example, source characteristics, such as knowledgeable individuals or in-group membership, have been shown to influence people’s memory for, and attitudes towards, the socially transmitted information (Carlson, 2019; Lee, Gelfand, & Kashima, 2014).
In summary, our studies show the importance of memory biases and the role of re-transmission in the reinforcement and spread of numerical misinformation. Our results demonstrate how schemas, in conjunction with re-transmission, can generate inaccurate information, facilitate the spread of inaccurate information from person to person, and exacerbate these errors through cumulative distortion, resulting from serial reproduction. Our findings are relevant to important questions about whether individuals possess an accurate understanding of the political world. Policy-relevant numerical facts play a prominent role in public discourse, as politicians, journalists, and interest groups use them as evidence to advocate for, or fight against, certain political causes. The ability of individuals to possess accurate representations of numerical facts may help protect them from the various forms of deceptive persuasion they encounter in their everyday lives.
Due to influence of competition outcome on testosterone, men preferred female facial femininity more after winning their competitive match; however, there were no corresponding effects in women
Welling, L.L.M et al. (2019). The infuence of competition outcome on testosterone and face preferences in men and women. Human Ethology, 34 (Suppl.). Aug 2019, HES77. htps://doi.org/10.22330/he/34/suppl
Conference proceedings not yet published... only abstract available:
Abstract: Previous research suggests that testosterone level is positively related to preferences for sexually dimorphic faces in both men and women. One method of manipulating testosterone is through competitive tasks, whereby testosterone increases in winners relative to losers. Welling et al. (2013) examined the effects of winning and losing in male–male competition on men’s face preferences. They randomly assigned male participants to either win or lose the first-person shooter video game CounterStrike: Source against an unseen male confederate. Unbeknownst to the participant, the confederate could control the outcome through game cheats. They found that, compared to men assigned to the losing condition, men assigned to the winning condition had significantly higher preferences for women’s facial femininity, which is a putative indicator of female mate quality. This study had two major limitations: it used a between-subjects design and it tested men only. Here we replicate Welling et al. (2013) using a within-subjects design and testing both men and women. Participants were randomly allocated to win the first of two sessions and lose the second, or vice versa. As predicted, men preferred female facial femininity more after winning their competitive match compared to after losing. However, there were no corresponding effects in women. These results replicate Welling et al.’s (2013) findings using a within-participant design and further suggest that the influence of same-sex competition on face preferences is exclusive to men. Salivary assays are currently being processed. It is predicted that testosterone will be higher after men won versus lost, but that there will be no significant difference in women’s testosterone as a function of competitive outcome.
Conference proceedings not yet published... only abstract available:
Abstract: Previous research suggests that testosterone level is positively related to preferences for sexually dimorphic faces in both men and women. One method of manipulating testosterone is through competitive tasks, whereby testosterone increases in winners relative to losers. Welling et al. (2013) examined the effects of winning and losing in male–male competition on men’s face preferences. They randomly assigned male participants to either win or lose the first-person shooter video game CounterStrike: Source against an unseen male confederate. Unbeknownst to the participant, the confederate could control the outcome through game cheats. They found that, compared to men assigned to the losing condition, men assigned to the winning condition had significantly higher preferences for women’s facial femininity, which is a putative indicator of female mate quality. This study had two major limitations: it used a between-subjects design and it tested men only. Here we replicate Welling et al. (2013) using a within-subjects design and testing both men and women. Participants were randomly allocated to win the first of two sessions and lose the second, or vice versa. As predicted, men preferred female facial femininity more after winning their competitive match compared to after losing. However, there were no corresponding effects in women. These results replicate Welling et al.’s (2013) findings using a within-participant design and further suggest that the influence of same-sex competition on face preferences is exclusive to men. Salivary assays are currently being processed. It is predicted that testosterone will be higher after men won versus lost, but that there will be no significant difference in women’s testosterone as a function of competitive outcome.
A multi-semester classroom demonstration yields "robust" evidence in support of the facial feedback effect
Marsh, A. A., Rhoads, S. A., & Ryan, R. M. A multi-semester classroom demonstration yields evidence in support of the facial feedback effect. Emotion, 19(8), 1500–1504, Dec 2019. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0000532
Abstract: The facial feedback effect refers to the influence of unobtrusive manipulations of facial behavior on emotional outcomes. That manipulations inducing or inhibiting smiling can shape positive affect and evaluations is a staple of undergraduate psychology curricula and supports theories of embodied emotion. Thus, the results of a Registered Replication Report indicating minimal evidence to support the facial feedback effect were widely viewed as cause for concern regarding the reliability of this effect. However, it has been suggested that features of the design of the replication studies may have influenced the study results. Relevant to these concerns are experimental facial feedback data collected from over 400 undergraduates over the course of 9 semesters. Circumstances of data collection met several criteria broadly recommended for testing the effect, including limited prior exposure to the facial feedback hypothesis, conditions minimally likely to induce self-focused attention, and the use of moderately funny contemporary cartoons as stimuli. Results yielded robust evidence in favor of the facial feedback hypothesis. Cartoons that participants evaluated while holding a pen or pencil in their teeth (smiling induction) were rated as funnier than cartoons they evaluated while holding a pen or pencil in their lips (smiling inhibition). The magnitude of the effect overlapped with original reports. Findings demonstrate that the facial feedback effect can be successfully replicated in a classroom setting and are in line with theories of emotional embodiment, according to which internal emotional states and relevant external emotional behaviors exert mutual influence on one another.
---
Discussion
The results of this study replicate the facial feedback effect in the type of classroom setting in
which this effect is often taught. In a large sample of undergraduate students beginning an
introductory psychology course, cartoons evaluated during a manipulation that simulates smiling
(holding a pen in the teeth) were rated as more humorous than when the cartoons were evaluated
during a manipulation that inhibits smiling (holding a pen in the lips). These results were
obtained following an analysis plan selected based on clustering of ratings among classes. The
analyses indicated that the manipulation resulted in a small-to-medium effect size, the magnitude
of which overlapped with the effect observed in the original report of the facial feedback effect.
The experimental conditions featured several strengths that may have contributed to the
observed effect. The nature of the testing setting precluded experimenter effects related to
differential treatment by condition, as both conditions were run simultaneously. It also
minimized the likelihood of previous formal exposure to the facial feedback effect, as the
experiment was conducted in introductory psychology students several weeks before the
textbook chapter describing the effect was assigned (it seems safe to assume no students read
several chapters ahead). It is, however, important to note we do not have formal confirmation of
participants’ prior lack of exposure to the feedback effect. Participants were not video recorded,
minimizing self-focused attention, which can alter response styles, affective experiences, and
self-report motivations. And contemporary cartoons rated as moderately funny were used as
stimuli.
The paradigm diverged from the original facial feedback experiment in several respects.
They include the classroom setting in which testing was conducted; the fact that each participant
rated two cartoons rather than four; the fact that it featured a within-subjects rather than betweensubjects design; the absence of a cover story about piloting a study for future research regarding
populations with disabilities to explain the manipulation; the use of a 7-point scale rather than a
10-point scale; the fact that the experiment was part of a classroom lecture about learning
(specifically, about the acquisition of conditioned associations) rather than following a linedrawing task; the fact that correct positioning of pens could be monitored only within the limits
of a group setting; the fact that participants selected but did not write down their ratings with
their pens in their mouths; and the lack of individualized follow-up with participants regarding
their beliefs about the experiment, precluding exclusion of participants for suspicions regarding
the study goals. (It is notable, however, that when the instructor presented students with their
results in the ensuing class, the most commonly verbalized reaction was surprise or disbelief that
the manipulation could have possibly affected their ratings.)
Results of two recent papers (Coles, Larsen, & Lench, 2017; Noah, Schul, & Mayo, 2018)
found that the facial feedback effect can be moderated by various factors. Noah and colleagues
found that the effect can be reduced by video-recording participants. The meta-analysis by Coles
and colleagues determined that another moderator is the choice of question, with evaluations of
the stimulus quality (i.e., how funny the cartoon is) showing larger effect sizes, but also more
evidence of publication bias, than ratings of amusement—although fewer estimates of the effect
on stimulus quality were available for analysis. The most important moderator that could be
accounted for statistically in the meta-analysis was the specific stimuli that were used during
testing. The choice of moderately funny contemporary cartoons in the present study may have
contributed to the effects we observed, as may other variables that have not been identified. The
consistency of the observed effect with original reports despite methodological differences,
however, could be interpreted in support of the effect’s robustness.
Overall, the results of the study are consistent with the notion that unobtrusive manipulations
of facial behavior can reliably shape emotional experiences and outcomes, in line with theories
of emotional embodiment.
Abstract: The facial feedback effect refers to the influence of unobtrusive manipulations of facial behavior on emotional outcomes. That manipulations inducing or inhibiting smiling can shape positive affect and evaluations is a staple of undergraduate psychology curricula and supports theories of embodied emotion. Thus, the results of a Registered Replication Report indicating minimal evidence to support the facial feedback effect were widely viewed as cause for concern regarding the reliability of this effect. However, it has been suggested that features of the design of the replication studies may have influenced the study results. Relevant to these concerns are experimental facial feedback data collected from over 400 undergraduates over the course of 9 semesters. Circumstances of data collection met several criteria broadly recommended for testing the effect, including limited prior exposure to the facial feedback hypothesis, conditions minimally likely to induce self-focused attention, and the use of moderately funny contemporary cartoons as stimuli. Results yielded robust evidence in favor of the facial feedback hypothesis. Cartoons that participants evaluated while holding a pen or pencil in their teeth (smiling induction) were rated as funnier than cartoons they evaluated while holding a pen or pencil in their lips (smiling inhibition). The magnitude of the effect overlapped with original reports. Findings demonstrate that the facial feedback effect can be successfully replicated in a classroom setting and are in line with theories of emotional embodiment, according to which internal emotional states and relevant external emotional behaviors exert mutual influence on one another.
---
Discussion
The results of this study replicate the facial feedback effect in the type of classroom setting in
which this effect is often taught. In a large sample of undergraduate students beginning an
introductory psychology course, cartoons evaluated during a manipulation that simulates smiling
(holding a pen in the teeth) were rated as more humorous than when the cartoons were evaluated
during a manipulation that inhibits smiling (holding a pen in the lips). These results were
obtained following an analysis plan selected based on clustering of ratings among classes. The
analyses indicated that the manipulation resulted in a small-to-medium effect size, the magnitude
of which overlapped with the effect observed in the original report of the facial feedback effect.
The experimental conditions featured several strengths that may have contributed to the
observed effect. The nature of the testing setting precluded experimenter effects related to
differential treatment by condition, as both conditions were run simultaneously. It also
minimized the likelihood of previous formal exposure to the facial feedback effect, as the
experiment was conducted in introductory psychology students several weeks before the
textbook chapter describing the effect was assigned (it seems safe to assume no students read
several chapters ahead). It is, however, important to note we do not have formal confirmation of
participants’ prior lack of exposure to the feedback effect. Participants were not video recorded,
minimizing self-focused attention, which can alter response styles, affective experiences, and
self-report motivations. And contemporary cartoons rated as moderately funny were used as
stimuli.
The paradigm diverged from the original facial feedback experiment in several respects.
They include the classroom setting in which testing was conducted; the fact that each participant
rated two cartoons rather than four; the fact that it featured a within-subjects rather than betweensubjects design; the absence of a cover story about piloting a study for future research regarding
populations with disabilities to explain the manipulation; the use of a 7-point scale rather than a
10-point scale; the fact that the experiment was part of a classroom lecture about learning
(specifically, about the acquisition of conditioned associations) rather than following a linedrawing task; the fact that correct positioning of pens could be monitored only within the limits
of a group setting; the fact that participants selected but did not write down their ratings with
their pens in their mouths; and the lack of individualized follow-up with participants regarding
their beliefs about the experiment, precluding exclusion of participants for suspicions regarding
the study goals. (It is notable, however, that when the instructor presented students with their
results in the ensuing class, the most commonly verbalized reaction was surprise or disbelief that
the manipulation could have possibly affected their ratings.)
Results of two recent papers (Coles, Larsen, & Lench, 2017; Noah, Schul, & Mayo, 2018)
found that the facial feedback effect can be moderated by various factors. Noah and colleagues
found that the effect can be reduced by video-recording participants. The meta-analysis by Coles
and colleagues determined that another moderator is the choice of question, with evaluations of
the stimulus quality (i.e., how funny the cartoon is) showing larger effect sizes, but also more
evidence of publication bias, than ratings of amusement—although fewer estimates of the effect
on stimulus quality were available for analysis. The most important moderator that could be
accounted for statistically in the meta-analysis was the specific stimuli that were used during
testing. The choice of moderately funny contemporary cartoons in the present study may have
contributed to the effects we observed, as may other variables that have not been identified. The
consistency of the observed effect with original reports despite methodological differences,
however, could be interpreted in support of the effect’s robustness.
Overall, the results of the study are consistent with the notion that unobtrusive manipulations
of facial behavior can reliably shape emotional experiences and outcomes, in line with theories
of emotional embodiment.
While Democrats are early adopters of progressive views, Republicans adopt the same views at a slower pace, which can be easily (mis)interpreted as a sign of polarization
D. Baldassarri, B. Park “Was there a Culture War? Partisan Polarization and Secular Trends in US Public Opinion”, Journal of Politics, forthcoming. Dec 2019. http://deliabaldassarri.org/research/2018/12/1/h29cyp99ttt2wuru2arp4n2u53vale
ABSTRACT: According to many scholars of public opinion, most of the fast-growing divide between Democrats and Republicans over the last few decades has taken place on moral issues. We find that the process of issue partisanship -- the sorting of political preferences along partisan lines -- properly accounts for public opinion dynamics in the economic and civil rights domains: on these issues Democrats as a whole have become more liberal and Republicans more conservative. However, when it comes to moral issues, the prominent change is a partisan secular trend, in which both Democrats and Republicans are adopting more progressive views on moral issues, although at a different rate. While Democrats are early adopters of progressive views, Republicans adopt the same views at a slower pace. This secular change can be easily (mis)interpreted as a sign of polarization because, at the onset of the process, the gap between party supporters broadens due to faster pace at which Democrats adopt progressive views, and only toward the end, the gap between partisan supporters decreases.
---
Furthermore, opinion change, especially on topics concerning gender roles, sexuality, marijuana legalization, and gay rights, has occurred too quickly to be accounted for by generational replacement or demographic shifts (Loftus 2001; Andersen and Fetner 2008; Fischer and Hout 2006). Instead, the secular trend observed for these issues is consistent with a social diffusion dynamic, which operates within generations. In addition, the lag in the adoption curves between Democrats and Republicans (and its persistence even when controlling for the demographic sorting of the electorate) points to the importance of partisan groups in the diffusion process.
Although we cannot provide empirical evidence of the micro-level dynamic of social influence, here we offer some considerations concerning some of the potential underlying mechanisms. In particular, as already anticipated in our general discussion of partisan secular trends,
media partisanship, the homophily of political discussion networks, and the mechanism of
selective disclosure may contribute to the social diffusion process documented in this paper.
Namely, progressive ‘innovators’, who are likely to be Democrats, will spread their views, first,
among like-minded Democrats, both because their political discussion networks are disproportionally composed by fellow Democrats, and because they selectively disclose their opinions
on salient issues to others who they anticipate will agree with them. However, since discussion networks are far from being perfectly homogeneous (Huckfeldt et al. 1995), progressive
opinions would eventually spread among Republicans as well.
In addition, some specific considerations concerning the structural position of gays and lesbians in social networks may partially explain why Republicans have so speedily embraced
secular views on LGBT issues when their elites chose to do otherwise. As with other minority
groups, knowing gays or lesbians has been shown to increase the support for gay rights among
almost all subgroups defined by socio-demographics, ideology, and partisanship (Lewis 2011).
However, compared to racial and socioeconomic cleavages that heavily segregate the interaction patterns of Americans, recent research suggests that interactions with gays and lesbians are
relatively uniformly distributed across the population (DiPrete et al. 2011).14 This is especially
true for social ties within the family, which tend to be “strong ties” both in the emotional and
structural sense (Granovetter 1973). The implication is that, at least in recent years, both Republicans and Democrats have similar probabilities of knowing someone in their close social
circles who is gay or lesbian. Thus, the social influence process might have operated ‘close
to home’, from within the family outwards. This may explain why Republicans have turned
towards more progressive views so easily on these issues. After all, even if party identification
operates as a perceptual screen of the political world (Campbell et al. 1960), it seems safe to
expect that the coming out of a family member or close friend will be a much more persuasive
message than the partisan cues of the political elite.
In sum, empirical evidence supports the claim that public opinion changes on moral issues
have followed a secular trend in which both Democrats and Republicans have adopted more
progressive opinions, although at a different pace. We speculate about the micro-level processes that bring about such outcomes: the partisan lag in the diffusion curves is likely due to
mechanisms of homophily and selective disclosure in political discussion networks. Whereas
the extraordinary pace of the change on gay rights may be due to the diminished segregation
and increased visibility of openly gays and lesbians in people’s social networks. Taken together,
these considerations point to the different nature of public opinion change in the moral domain,
and the possible primacy of social diffusion processes over more classic, party-driven models
of opinion change.
Why is public opinion in the moral domain evolving differently from other domains? Although we cannot provide a fully satisfactory answer here, we mention a couple of possible reasons. First, not all issues are created equal. While the political debate in Western democracies
is usually organized around economic and eventually, geographic or ethnic cleavages (Lipset
and Rokkan 1967), most positions on moral issues do not logically follow from core political
ideologies. This is certainly true in most Western European countries, where the church-state
separation is often written in the Constitution, and the political debate is mainly organized
around issues of redistribution, welfare state, and taxation. However, even in the US, the logical
link between parties’ core ideologies and their stand on moral issues is weak at most (Converse
1964; Baldassarri and Goldberg 2014): for example, it is quite difficult to reconcile Republicans’ laissez faire economic agenda and their opposition to any form of gun control with their
heavily regulatory stand on reproductive issues. Second, moral issues are often concerned with
whether a certain behavior – e.g., women employment in the workforce, smoking marijuana,
gay raising kids – is considered acceptable. As a long tradition in sociology has demonstrated,
what is considered ‘moral’ often coincides with what is considered normal, or ‘average behavior’ in a society: thus the social norm that most people follow in a given space-time (Durkheim
1906). If this is the case, it is understandable why opinions on this type of issues are more
subjected to bottom-up dynamics of diffusion and social influence.
ABSTRACT: According to many scholars of public opinion, most of the fast-growing divide between Democrats and Republicans over the last few decades has taken place on moral issues. We find that the process of issue partisanship -- the sorting of political preferences along partisan lines -- properly accounts for public opinion dynamics in the economic and civil rights domains: on these issues Democrats as a whole have become more liberal and Republicans more conservative. However, when it comes to moral issues, the prominent change is a partisan secular trend, in which both Democrats and Republicans are adopting more progressive views on moral issues, although at a different rate. While Democrats are early adopters of progressive views, Republicans adopt the same views at a slower pace. This secular change can be easily (mis)interpreted as a sign of polarization because, at the onset of the process, the gap between party supporters broadens due to faster pace at which Democrats adopt progressive views, and only toward the end, the gap between partisan supporters decreases.
---
Furthermore, opinion change, especially on topics concerning gender roles, sexuality, marijuana legalization, and gay rights, has occurred too quickly to be accounted for by generational replacement or demographic shifts (Loftus 2001; Andersen and Fetner 2008; Fischer and Hout 2006). Instead, the secular trend observed for these issues is consistent with a social diffusion dynamic, which operates within generations. In addition, the lag in the adoption curves between Democrats and Republicans (and its persistence even when controlling for the demographic sorting of the electorate) points to the importance of partisan groups in the diffusion process.
Although we cannot provide empirical evidence of the micro-level dynamic of social influence, here we offer some considerations concerning some of the potential underlying mechanisms. In particular, as already anticipated in our general discussion of partisan secular trends,
media partisanship, the homophily of political discussion networks, and the mechanism of
selective disclosure may contribute to the social diffusion process documented in this paper.
Namely, progressive ‘innovators’, who are likely to be Democrats, will spread their views, first,
among like-minded Democrats, both because their political discussion networks are disproportionally composed by fellow Democrats, and because they selectively disclose their opinions
on salient issues to others who they anticipate will agree with them. However, since discussion networks are far from being perfectly homogeneous (Huckfeldt et al. 1995), progressive
opinions would eventually spread among Republicans as well.
In addition, some specific considerations concerning the structural position of gays and lesbians in social networks may partially explain why Republicans have so speedily embraced
secular views on LGBT issues when their elites chose to do otherwise. As with other minority
groups, knowing gays or lesbians has been shown to increase the support for gay rights among
almost all subgroups defined by socio-demographics, ideology, and partisanship (Lewis 2011).
However, compared to racial and socioeconomic cleavages that heavily segregate the interaction patterns of Americans, recent research suggests that interactions with gays and lesbians are
relatively uniformly distributed across the population (DiPrete et al. 2011).14 This is especially
true for social ties within the family, which tend to be “strong ties” both in the emotional and
structural sense (Granovetter 1973). The implication is that, at least in recent years, both Republicans and Democrats have similar probabilities of knowing someone in their close social
circles who is gay or lesbian. Thus, the social influence process might have operated ‘close
to home’, from within the family outwards. This may explain why Republicans have turned
towards more progressive views so easily on these issues. After all, even if party identification
operates as a perceptual screen of the political world (Campbell et al. 1960), it seems safe to
expect that the coming out of a family member or close friend will be a much more persuasive
message than the partisan cues of the political elite.
In sum, empirical evidence supports the claim that public opinion changes on moral issues
have followed a secular trend in which both Democrats and Republicans have adopted more
progressive opinions, although at a different pace. We speculate about the micro-level processes that bring about such outcomes: the partisan lag in the diffusion curves is likely due to
mechanisms of homophily and selective disclosure in political discussion networks. Whereas
the extraordinary pace of the change on gay rights may be due to the diminished segregation
and increased visibility of openly gays and lesbians in people’s social networks. Taken together,
these considerations point to the different nature of public opinion change in the moral domain,
and the possible primacy of social diffusion processes over more classic, party-driven models
of opinion change.
Why is public opinion in the moral domain evolving differently from other domains? Although we cannot provide a fully satisfactory answer here, we mention a couple of possible reasons. First, not all issues are created equal. While the political debate in Western democracies
is usually organized around economic and eventually, geographic or ethnic cleavages (Lipset
and Rokkan 1967), most positions on moral issues do not logically follow from core political
ideologies. This is certainly true in most Western European countries, where the church-state
separation is often written in the Constitution, and the political debate is mainly organized
around issues of redistribution, welfare state, and taxation. However, even in the US, the logical
link between parties’ core ideologies and their stand on moral issues is weak at most (Converse
1964; Baldassarri and Goldberg 2014): for example, it is quite difficult to reconcile Republicans’ laissez faire economic agenda and their opposition to any form of gun control with their
heavily regulatory stand on reproductive issues. Second, moral issues are often concerned with
whether a certain behavior – e.g., women employment in the workforce, smoking marijuana,
gay raising kids – is considered acceptable. As a long tradition in sociology has demonstrated,
what is considered ‘moral’ often coincides with what is considered normal, or ‘average behavior’ in a society: thus the social norm that most people follow in a given space-time (Durkheim
1906). If this is the case, it is understandable why opinions on this type of issues are more
subjected to bottom-up dynamics of diffusion and social influence.
Men Are Funnier than Women under a Condition of Low Self-Efficacy but Women Are Funnier than Men under a Condition of High Self-Efficacy
Men Are Funnier than Women under a Condition of Low Self-Efficacy but Women Are Funnier than Men under a Condition of High Self-Efficacy. Tracy L. Caldwell, Paulina Wojtach. Sex Roles, December 9 2019. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11199-019-01109-w
Abstract: The debate about whether women can be as funny as men pervades the popular press, and research has sometimes supported the stereotype that men are funnier (Mickes et al. 2011). The goal of the present research was to determine whether this gender difference can be explained by differences in beliefs about one’s capability for humor (“humor self-efficacy”). Male and female U.S. undergraduates (n = 64) generated captions for 20 cartoons and rated their own humor self-efficacy. Subsequently, an independent sample of 370 Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) users evaluated these captions in a knockout-style tournament in which pairs of captions were presented with each of the cartoons. Each participant was randomly assigned to evaluate captions which were authored by men and women selected to be either low or high in humor self-efficacy. In the initial round of the tournament, each caption was authored by a man and a woman matched for comparable levels of self-identified humor self-efficacy. In subsequent rounds, the remaining captions were paired randomly. MTurk users, unaware of the captioners’ gender, selected the captions of men as funnier only under the low self-efficacy condition and those of women as funnier under the high self-efficacy condition. These data suggest that self-efficacy may be a critical determinant of the successful performance of humor. When people say that women are not funny, they may be relying on an unfounded stereotype. We discuss how this stereotype may negatively affect perceptions of women in the workplace and other settings.
Keywords: Humor Cartoons Human sex differences Sex roles Stereotyped attitudes Sex role attitudes
Men Are Funnier than Women under a Condition of Low Self-Efficacy but Women Are Funnier than Men under a Condition of High Self-Efficacy. Tracy L. Caldwell, Paulina Wojtach. Sex Roles, December 9 2019. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11199-019-01109-w
Abstract: The debate about whether women can be as funny as men pervades the popular press, and research has sometimes supported the stereotype that men are funnier (Mickes et al. 2011). The goal of the present research was to determine whether this gender difference can be explained by differences in beliefs about one’s capability for humor (“humor self-efficacy”). Male and female U.S. undergraduates (n = 64) generated captions for 20 cartoons and rated their own humor self-efficacy. Subsequently, an independent sample of 370 Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) users evaluated these captions in a knockout-style tournament in which pairs of captions were presented with each of the cartoons. Each participant was randomly assigned to evaluate captions which were authored by men and women selected to be either low or high in humor self-efficacy. In the initial round of the tournament, each caption was authored by a man and a woman matched for comparable levels of self-identified humor self-efficacy. In subsequent rounds, the remaining captions were paired randomly. MTurk users, unaware of the captioners’ gender, selected the captions of men as funnier only under the low self-efficacy condition and those of women as funnier under the high self-efficacy condition. These data suggest that self-efficacy may be a critical determinant of the successful performance of humor. When people say that women are not funny, they may be relying on an unfounded stereotype. We discuss how this stereotype may negatively affect perceptions of women in the workplace and other settings.
Keywords: Humor Cartoons Human sex differences Sex roles Stereotyped attitudes Sex role attitudes
Men Are Funnier than Women under a Condition of Low Self-Efficacy but Women Are Funnier than Men under a Condition of High Self-Efficacy. Tracy L. Caldwell, Paulina Wojtach. Sex Roles, December 9 2019. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11199-019-01109-w
Abstract: The debate about whether women can be as funny as men pervades the popular press, and research has sometimes supported the stereotype that men are funnier (Mickes et al. 2011). The goal of the present research was to determine whether this gender difference can be explained by differences in beliefs about one’s capability for humor (“humor self-efficacy”). Male and female U.S. undergraduates (n = 64) generated captions for 20 cartoons and rated their own humor self-efficacy. Subsequently, an independent sample of 370 Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) users evaluated these captions in a knockout-style tournament in which pairs of captions were presented with each of the cartoons. Each participant was randomly assigned to evaluate captions which were authored by men and women selected to be either low or high in humor self-efficacy. In the initial round of the tournament, each caption was authored by a man and a woman matched for comparable levels of self-identified humor self-efficacy. In subsequent rounds, the remaining captions were paired randomly. MTurk users, unaware of the captioners’ gender, selected the captions of men as funnier only under the low self-efficacy condition and those of women as funnier under the high self-efficacy condition. These data suggest that self-efficacy may be a critical determinant of the successful performance of humor. When people say that women are not funny, they may be relying on an unfounded stereotype. We discuss how this stereotype may negatively affect perceptions of women in the workplace and other settings.
Keywords: Humor Cartoons Human sex differences Sex roles Stereotyped attitudes Sex role attitudes
Discussion
In replication of findings by Mickes et al. (2011) and
Greengross and Miller (2011), but contrary to those by
Howrigan and MacDonald (2008), our participants found
men to be, on average, more skilled at captioning New
Yorker cartoons than women. This difference was qualified,
as hypothesized, by the humor self-efficacy of the captioner;
male captioners were funnier in the low self-efficacy condition
and female captioners were funnier in the high self-efficacy
condition. Participants’ response to the question, “Who is funnier?,”
which can be interpreted as an implicit measure of
whether they endorse the stereotype that women are not funny,
varied by sample: The most frequent answer among
captioners in Phase 1, whose participants were all undergraduates, was
“neither” (42.2%), followed by “men” (38.2%),
then women (“19.6%”). This pattern was the same for men
and women. Those who rated the captions in Phase 2 were a
more age-diverse sample of MTurk users, and their answers
were “men” (44.7%), followed by “neither” (37.9%), then
“women” (17.3%) and these responses were heavily influenced by participants’
gender, such that those who responded
that men are funnier were overwhelmingly male, whereas
those who said women were funnier were overwhelmingly
female. However, contrary to Mickes et al.’s (2011) findings,
raters’self-reported preference for men’s humor did not cause
them to show a gendered preference for men’s humor greater
than that of women. In other words, although men (but not
women) told us that men are funnier, their preferences for
men’s humor was no greater than that of women, and it was
not in evidence when rating the captions of women who were
higher in self-efficacy.
We anticipated that men’s superiority at captioning New
Yorker cartoons would lessen under conditions of high self-efficacy
on the basis that the male and female captioners in
Mickes et al.’s (2011) study differed in their self-reported self-confidence.
We argue that this gender difference in self-confidence could
also account for the gender differences in
humor observed in other studies (Greengross and Miller 2011;
Howrigan and MacDonald 2008). When women internalize a
culture’s prescriptions against using humor, they chronically
operate under conditions of low self-efficacy. Our data suggest
that men and women are matched in their ability to perform
humor, but that their self-beliefs and the contexts that prime
these self-beliefs may influence its skilled performance.
Consider a compelling example of this reasoning in research
by Hull et al. (2016): Their participants were asked to produce
humor under one of two instructional cues, to either be funny
or to be catchy. All participants performed better when told to
be catchy, but women outperformed men when told to be
funny. Context mattered and confidence may be key. Also
consider research by Hooper et al. (2016), in which they asked
undergraduates from Britain, Canada, and Australia to rate
captions submitted to the New Yorker’s captioning contest by
men and women wishing to test their comic mettle. There
were no differences in the rated funniness of the captions,
except in Britain, where women’s captions were favored over
men’s. Their data show that when women have the confidence
to self-select into a captioning task, they perform at least
equally as well as men in some cultural contexts and better
in others for the same jokes.
The goal of the present study was to investigate whether
one could create a circumstance under which women could be
capable of performing humor nearly as well as men. The answer,
surprisingly, was that under conditions of high self-efficacy,
women were even more capable than men, a finding that
is “surprising” in light of the ubiquity of messages prohibiting
women’s performance of humor, including this comment on
the YouTube trailer for the all-female Ghostbusters reboot
(Sony Pictures Entertainment 2016): “Ok so I read the description
and I noticed something strange, it says ‘rebooted
with a new cast of hilarious characters’....Did these hilarious
character just not make it into the final movie or did I miss
something?” It could be easy to dismiss this kind of prejudice,
given that it is directed to four superstar comics whose careers
have fared quite well in spite of detractors. However, there are
contexts in which prejudice against women’s humor can be
more widely consequential. For example, Decker and
Rotondo (2001) found, in the workplace, that women who
used negative humor (sexual and offensive humor) were
judged as being less effective leaders than men who used the
same kind of humor and that this finding emerged even when
controlling for the gender of the respondent. When the humor
was positive, on the other hand, women were rated higher on
relationship behaviors and effectiveness than men. Their data
suggest that both men and women hold implicit beliefs about
humor and gender roles and that women’s financial well-being
is at greater risk than men’s when they use sexual and offensive humor.
Another place in which humor and gender are performed
with some risk is in romantic attraction. In the context of
heterosexual attraction, when it comes to humor, men have
indicated they prefer women who will laugh at their jokes to
those who will produce their own humor (Bressler et al. 2006;
Hone et al. 2015). Other research indicates that a woman’s use
of humor is, at best, irrelevant to her potential mate value (i.e.,
when given the choice between a woman who uses humor to
one who does not, they show no clear preference; Bressler and
Balshine 2006; Wilbur and Campbell 2011) and at worst, it
makes women less attractive (Lundy et al. 1998). Women’s
use of humor, then, may be the basis for rejection at the box
office, in the workplace, and in the dating context.
To be clear, there are just as many studies demonstrating
that men and women do not differ in their interest in humorous
partners in the context of romantic relationships (i.e., not all
men find humor unattractive; Buss 1988; DiDonato et al.
2013; Feingold 1992; Kenrick et al. 1990; Treger et al.
2013). Likewise, there are movie trailers starring all-female
casts of comics that are not trolled hard. For example, whereas
Sony Pictures Entertainment’s (2016) official Ghostbusters
trailer has nearly 300,000 YouTube comments, largely negative, Universal Pictures’s (2011) official Bridesmaids trailer
has under 1000. Perhaps the critical difference is that
Ghostbusters treads on hallowed male comics’ ground (the
original starred comedy darlings Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd,
and Harold Ramis) and Bridesmaids is a “chick flick.” Similar
hallowed ground was encroached upon in the newest take on
the comedy-heist “Oceans” series, Ocean 8, starring an allfemale cast,
whose YouTube trailer (Warner Bros. Pictures
2018) comments include, “Oh great, another all-female reboot,
‘cause Ghostbusters turned out great” and “Coming
soon: No Country for Old Women.” These examples suggest
that the answer to the question “Should women use humor?”
is: “Sure, as long as it is performed in qualitatively distinct
contexts from which men perform it.” Granted, these comments represent
the sentiments of a highly self-selected sample, thus, in future
research, one might explore just how representative
they are. Recall, however, that men’s selfprofessed preference for men’s over women’s humor was
not matched, in our sample of raters, with a measured preference for
men’s cartoon captions greater than that of women’s
cartoon captions. We take these data as preliminary evidence
that gender bias shaped men’s stated preferences.
Limitations
Overall, our data would seem to specify that the circumstance
under which men are likely to “out-humor” women is when
women’s self-efficacy is low. One shortcoming of our study is
that we cannot determine the provenance of our captioners’
self-efficacy: Did we create experimental contexts that caused
differences in humor self-efficacy or were these differences
pre-existing? Results from the caption-generation phase indicated we
were not able to demonstrate, at the level of the entire
sample, that we had successfully manipulated self-efficacy, so
we “cherry-picked” our captioners to create quasiexperimental
conditions of low and high self-efficacy, to determine if differences
in captioners’ self-efficacy were detectable by an independent
sample of raters. The quasiexperimental nature of our study makes it difficult to rule
out raw humor talent as a third variable that could simultaneously
explain captioners’ self-efficacy and their humorousness. That said,
this third variable explanation cannot explain
why men were perceived as funnier in the low self-efficacy
condition and women as funnier in the high self-efficacy condition; if
raw talent were the cause of captioners’self-efficacy
ratings and their humorousness, then it should have had the
effect of equalizing humor ability across gender. Nevertheless,
if our paradigm were to be used again, the manipulation of
self-efficacy would need to be strengthened to determine its
causality.
It is possible that we did in fact successfully manipulate
self-efficacy but that our assessment of it was not sensitive
enough. Bandura (1977) recommends a microanalytic assessment strategy
in which one assesses self-beliefs about a
targeted and objective behavioral outcome in a particular domain (e.g.,
“How confident are you that you can correctly
answer seven of these ten questions about global climate
change?”). Our assessment of humor self-efficacy consisted
of asking participants “How funny do you think others will
find your cartoon captions?” In hindsight, our question may
not have assessed self-beliefs so much as it did their beliefs
about others’ perceptions of their humor. An individual can
simultaneously be very confident that she can crack jokes that
she will find hilarious while recognizing that the average person
might not appreciate her attempts at humor. Moreover, our
question does not ask them about a behavioral outcome that
can be objectively measured. This is due in part to the subjectivity
of humor. Nevertheless, a rephrasing that comes closer
to Bandura’s original recommendation is: “How confident are
you that you can write at least three [or four or five, etc.]
captions that others with a similar sense of humor might find
funny?” A better assessment of self-efficacy is critical for
determining its role in explaining gender differences in humorous performance.
In short, participants within each of our quasi-experimental
conditions of the captioning phase shared something in common that
led to differences in their humorous performance.
We believe that self-efficacy was what caused variations in
their humorous performance, but we cannot completely rule
out raw talent as a third variable. A more effective manipulation
and assessment of self-efficacy is warranted.
Abstract: The debate about whether women can be as funny as men pervades the popular press, and research has sometimes supported the stereotype that men are funnier (Mickes et al. 2011). The goal of the present research was to determine whether this gender difference can be explained by differences in beliefs about one’s capability for humor (“humor self-efficacy”). Male and female U.S. undergraduates (n = 64) generated captions for 20 cartoons and rated their own humor self-efficacy. Subsequently, an independent sample of 370 Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) users evaluated these captions in a knockout-style tournament in which pairs of captions were presented with each of the cartoons. Each participant was randomly assigned to evaluate captions which were authored by men and women selected to be either low or high in humor self-efficacy. In the initial round of the tournament, each caption was authored by a man and a woman matched for comparable levels of self-identified humor self-efficacy. In subsequent rounds, the remaining captions were paired randomly. MTurk users, unaware of the captioners’ gender, selected the captions of men as funnier only under the low self-efficacy condition and those of women as funnier under the high self-efficacy condition. These data suggest that self-efficacy may be a critical determinant of the successful performance of humor. When people say that women are not funny, they may be relying on an unfounded stereotype. We discuss how this stereotype may negatively affect perceptions of women in the workplace and other settings.
Keywords: Humor Cartoons Human sex differences Sex roles Stereotyped attitudes Sex role attitudes
Men Are Funnier than Women under a Condition of Low Self-Efficacy but Women Are Funnier than Men under a Condition of High Self-Efficacy. Tracy L. Caldwell, Paulina Wojtach. Sex Roles, December 9 2019. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11199-019-01109-w
Abstract: The debate about whether women can be as funny as men pervades the popular press, and research has sometimes supported the stereotype that men are funnier (Mickes et al. 2011). The goal of the present research was to determine whether this gender difference can be explained by differences in beliefs about one’s capability for humor (“humor self-efficacy”). Male and female U.S. undergraduates (n = 64) generated captions for 20 cartoons and rated their own humor self-efficacy. Subsequently, an independent sample of 370 Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) users evaluated these captions in a knockout-style tournament in which pairs of captions were presented with each of the cartoons. Each participant was randomly assigned to evaluate captions which were authored by men and women selected to be either low or high in humor self-efficacy. In the initial round of the tournament, each caption was authored by a man and a woman matched for comparable levels of self-identified humor self-efficacy. In subsequent rounds, the remaining captions were paired randomly. MTurk users, unaware of the captioners’ gender, selected the captions of men as funnier only under the low self-efficacy condition and those of women as funnier under the high self-efficacy condition. These data suggest that self-efficacy may be a critical determinant of the successful performance of humor. When people say that women are not funny, they may be relying on an unfounded stereotype. We discuss how this stereotype may negatively affect perceptions of women in the workplace and other settings.
Keywords: Humor Cartoons Human sex differences Sex roles Stereotyped attitudes Sex role attitudes
Men Are Funnier than Women under a Condition of Low Self-Efficacy but Women Are Funnier than Men under a Condition of High Self-Efficacy. Tracy L. Caldwell, Paulina Wojtach. Sex Roles, December 9 2019. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11199-019-01109-w
Abstract: The debate about whether women can be as funny as men pervades the popular press, and research has sometimes supported the stereotype that men are funnier (Mickes et al. 2011). The goal of the present research was to determine whether this gender difference can be explained by differences in beliefs about one’s capability for humor (“humor self-efficacy”). Male and female U.S. undergraduates (n = 64) generated captions for 20 cartoons and rated their own humor self-efficacy. Subsequently, an independent sample of 370 Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) users evaluated these captions in a knockout-style tournament in which pairs of captions were presented with each of the cartoons. Each participant was randomly assigned to evaluate captions which were authored by men and women selected to be either low or high in humor self-efficacy. In the initial round of the tournament, each caption was authored by a man and a woman matched for comparable levels of self-identified humor self-efficacy. In subsequent rounds, the remaining captions were paired randomly. MTurk users, unaware of the captioners’ gender, selected the captions of men as funnier only under the low self-efficacy condition and those of women as funnier under the high self-efficacy condition. These data suggest that self-efficacy may be a critical determinant of the successful performance of humor. When people say that women are not funny, they may be relying on an unfounded stereotype. We discuss how this stereotype may negatively affect perceptions of women in the workplace and other settings.
Keywords: Humor Cartoons Human sex differences Sex roles Stereotyped attitudes Sex role attitudes
Men Are Funnier than Women under a Condition of Low Self-Efficacy but Women Are Funnier than Men under a Condition of High Self-Efficacy. Tracy L. Caldwell, Paulina Wojtach. Sex Roles, December 9 2019. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11199-019-01109-w
Abstract: The debate about whether women can be as funny as men pervades the popular press, and research has sometimes supported the stereotype that men are funnier (Mickes et al. 2011). The goal of the present research was to determine whether this gender difference can be explained by differences in beliefs about one’s capability for humor (“humor self-efficacy”). Male and female U.S. undergraduates (n = 64) generated captions for 20 cartoons and rated their own humor self-efficacy. Subsequently, an independent sample of 370 Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) users evaluated these captions in a knockout-style tournament in which pairs of captions were presented with each of the cartoons. Each participant was randomly assigned to evaluate captions which were authored by men and women selected to be either low or high in humor self-efficacy. In the initial round of the tournament, each caption was authored by a man and a woman matched for comparable levels of self-identified humor self-efficacy. In subsequent rounds, the remaining captions were paired randomly. MTurk users, unaware of the captioners’ gender, selected the captions of men as funnier only under the low self-efficacy condition and those of women as funnier under the high self-efficacy condition. These data suggest that self-efficacy may be a critical determinant of the successful performance of humor. When people say that women are not funny, they may be relying on an unfounded stereotype. We discuss how this stereotype may negatively affect perceptions of women in the workplace and other settings.
Keywords: Humor Cartoons Human sex differences Sex roles Stereotyped attitudes Sex role attitudes
Discussion
In replication of findings by Mickes et al. (2011) and
Greengross and Miller (2011), but contrary to those by
Howrigan and MacDonald (2008), our participants found
men to be, on average, more skilled at captioning New
Yorker cartoons than women. This difference was qualified,
as hypothesized, by the humor self-efficacy of the captioner;
male captioners were funnier in the low self-efficacy condition
and female captioners were funnier in the high self-efficacy
condition. Participants’ response to the question, “Who is funnier?,”
which can be interpreted as an implicit measure of
whether they endorse the stereotype that women are not funny,
varied by sample: The most frequent answer among
captioners in Phase 1, whose participants were all undergraduates, was
“neither” (42.2%), followed by “men” (38.2%),
then women (“19.6%”). This pattern was the same for men
and women. Those who rated the captions in Phase 2 were a
more age-diverse sample of MTurk users, and their answers
were “men” (44.7%), followed by “neither” (37.9%), then
“women” (17.3%) and these responses were heavily influenced by participants’
gender, such that those who responded
that men are funnier were overwhelmingly male, whereas
those who said women were funnier were overwhelmingly
female. However, contrary to Mickes et al.’s (2011) findings,
raters’self-reported preference for men’s humor did not cause
them to show a gendered preference for men’s humor greater
than that of women. In other words, although men (but not
women) told us that men are funnier, their preferences for
men’s humor was no greater than that of women, and it was
not in evidence when rating the captions of women who were
higher in self-efficacy.
We anticipated that men’s superiority at captioning New
Yorker cartoons would lessen under conditions of high self-efficacy
on the basis that the male and female captioners in
Mickes et al.’s (2011) study differed in their self-reported self-confidence.
We argue that this gender difference in self-confidence could
also account for the gender differences in
humor observed in other studies (Greengross and Miller 2011;
Howrigan and MacDonald 2008). When women internalize a
culture’s prescriptions against using humor, they chronically
operate under conditions of low self-efficacy. Our data suggest
that men and women are matched in their ability to perform
humor, but that their self-beliefs and the contexts that prime
these self-beliefs may influence its skilled performance.
Consider a compelling example of this reasoning in research
by Hull et al. (2016): Their participants were asked to produce
humor under one of two instructional cues, to either be funny
or to be catchy. All participants performed better when told to
be catchy, but women outperformed men when told to be
funny. Context mattered and confidence may be key. Also
consider research by Hooper et al. (2016), in which they asked
undergraduates from Britain, Canada, and Australia to rate
captions submitted to the New Yorker’s captioning contest by
men and women wishing to test their comic mettle. There
were no differences in the rated funniness of the captions,
except in Britain, where women’s captions were favored over
men’s. Their data show that when women have the confidence
to self-select into a captioning task, they perform at least
equally as well as men in some cultural contexts and better
in others for the same jokes.
The goal of the present study was to investigate whether
one could create a circumstance under which women could be
capable of performing humor nearly as well as men. The answer,
surprisingly, was that under conditions of high self-efficacy,
women were even more capable than men, a finding that
is “surprising” in light of the ubiquity of messages prohibiting
women’s performance of humor, including this comment on
the YouTube trailer for the all-female Ghostbusters reboot
(Sony Pictures Entertainment 2016): “Ok so I read the description
and I noticed something strange, it says ‘rebooted
with a new cast of hilarious characters’....Did these hilarious
character just not make it into the final movie or did I miss
something?” It could be easy to dismiss this kind of prejudice,
given that it is directed to four superstar comics whose careers
have fared quite well in spite of detractors. However, there are
contexts in which prejudice against women’s humor can be
more widely consequential. For example, Decker and
Rotondo (2001) found, in the workplace, that women who
used negative humor (sexual and offensive humor) were
judged as being less effective leaders than men who used the
same kind of humor and that this finding emerged even when
controlling for the gender of the respondent. When the humor
was positive, on the other hand, women were rated higher on
relationship behaviors and effectiveness than men. Their data
suggest that both men and women hold implicit beliefs about
humor and gender roles and that women’s financial well-being
is at greater risk than men’s when they use sexual and offensive humor.
Another place in which humor and gender are performed
with some risk is in romantic attraction. In the context of
heterosexual attraction, when it comes to humor, men have
indicated they prefer women who will laugh at their jokes to
those who will produce their own humor (Bressler et al. 2006;
Hone et al. 2015). Other research indicates that a woman’s use
of humor is, at best, irrelevant to her potential mate value (i.e.,
when given the choice between a woman who uses humor to
one who does not, they show no clear preference; Bressler and
Balshine 2006; Wilbur and Campbell 2011) and at worst, it
makes women less attractive (Lundy et al. 1998). Women’s
use of humor, then, may be the basis for rejection at the box
office, in the workplace, and in the dating context.
To be clear, there are just as many studies demonstrating
that men and women do not differ in their interest in humorous
partners in the context of romantic relationships (i.e., not all
men find humor unattractive; Buss 1988; DiDonato et al.
2013; Feingold 1992; Kenrick et al. 1990; Treger et al.
2013). Likewise, there are movie trailers starring all-female
casts of comics that are not trolled hard. For example, whereas
Sony Pictures Entertainment’s (2016) official Ghostbusters
trailer has nearly 300,000 YouTube comments, largely negative, Universal Pictures’s (2011) official Bridesmaids trailer
has under 1000. Perhaps the critical difference is that
Ghostbusters treads on hallowed male comics’ ground (the
original starred comedy darlings Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd,
and Harold Ramis) and Bridesmaids is a “chick flick.” Similar
hallowed ground was encroached upon in the newest take on
the comedy-heist “Oceans” series, Ocean 8, starring an allfemale cast,
whose YouTube trailer (Warner Bros. Pictures
2018) comments include, “Oh great, another all-female reboot,
‘cause Ghostbusters turned out great” and “Coming
soon: No Country for Old Women.” These examples suggest
that the answer to the question “Should women use humor?”
is: “Sure, as long as it is performed in qualitatively distinct
contexts from which men perform it.” Granted, these comments represent
the sentiments of a highly self-selected sample, thus, in future
research, one might explore just how representative
they are. Recall, however, that men’s selfprofessed preference for men’s over women’s humor was
not matched, in our sample of raters, with a measured preference for
men’s cartoon captions greater than that of women’s
cartoon captions. We take these data as preliminary evidence
that gender bias shaped men’s stated preferences.
Limitations
Overall, our data would seem to specify that the circumstance
under which men are likely to “out-humor” women is when
women’s self-efficacy is low. One shortcoming of our study is
that we cannot determine the provenance of our captioners’
self-efficacy: Did we create experimental contexts that caused
differences in humor self-efficacy or were these differences
pre-existing? Results from the caption-generation phase indicated we
were not able to demonstrate, at the level of the entire
sample, that we had successfully manipulated self-efficacy, so
we “cherry-picked” our captioners to create quasiexperimental
conditions of low and high self-efficacy, to determine if differences
in captioners’ self-efficacy were detectable by an independent
sample of raters. The quasiexperimental nature of our study makes it difficult to rule
out raw humor talent as a third variable that could simultaneously
explain captioners’ self-efficacy and their humorousness. That said,
this third variable explanation cannot explain
why men were perceived as funnier in the low self-efficacy
condition and women as funnier in the high self-efficacy condition; if
raw talent were the cause of captioners’self-efficacy
ratings and their humorousness, then it should have had the
effect of equalizing humor ability across gender. Nevertheless,
if our paradigm were to be used again, the manipulation of
self-efficacy would need to be strengthened to determine its
causality.
It is possible that we did in fact successfully manipulate
self-efficacy but that our assessment of it was not sensitive
enough. Bandura (1977) recommends a microanalytic assessment strategy
in which one assesses self-beliefs about a
targeted and objective behavioral outcome in a particular domain (e.g.,
“How confident are you that you can correctly
answer seven of these ten questions about global climate
change?”). Our assessment of humor self-efficacy consisted
of asking participants “How funny do you think others will
find your cartoon captions?” In hindsight, our question may
not have assessed self-beliefs so much as it did their beliefs
about others’ perceptions of their humor. An individual can
simultaneously be very confident that she can crack jokes that
she will find hilarious while recognizing that the average person
might not appreciate her attempts at humor. Moreover, our
question does not ask them about a behavioral outcome that
can be objectively measured. This is due in part to the subjectivity
of humor. Nevertheless, a rephrasing that comes closer
to Bandura’s original recommendation is: “How confident are
you that you can write at least three [or four or five, etc.]
captions that others with a similar sense of humor might find
funny?” A better assessment of self-efficacy is critical for
determining its role in explaining gender differences in humorous performance.
In short, participants within each of our quasi-experimental
conditions of the captioning phase shared something in common that
led to differences in their humorous performance.
We believe that self-efficacy was what caused variations in
their humorous performance, but we cannot completely rule
out raw talent as a third variable. A more effective manipulation
and assessment of self-efficacy is warranted.
Witnessing fewer credible cultural cues of religious commitment is the most potent predictor of religious disbelief, β=0.28, followed distantly by reflective cognitive style
Gervais, Will M., Maxine B. Najle, Sarah R. Schiavone, and Nava Caluori. 2019. “The Origins of Religious Disbelief: A Dual Inheritance Approach.” PsyArXiv. December 8. doi:10.31234/osf.io/e29rt
Abstract: Religion is a core feature of human nature, yet a comprehensive evolutionary approach toreligion must account for religious disbelief. Despite potentially drastic overreporting of religiosity[1], a third of the world’s 7+ billion human inhabitants may actually be atheists—merely people who do not believe in God or gods. The origins of disbelief thus present a key testing ground for theories of religion. Here, we evaluate the predictions of three prominent theoretical approaches to the origins of disbelief, and find considerable support for dual inheritance (gene-culture coevolution) approach. This dual inheritance model[2,3] derives from distinct literatures addressing the putative 1) core social cognitive faculties that enable mental representation of gods[4–7], 2) the challenges to existential security that motivate people to treat some god candidates as real and strategically important[8,9], 3) evolved cultural learning processes that influence which god candidates naïve learners treat as real rather than imaginary[3,10–12], and4) the intuitive processes that sustain belief in gods[13–15] and the cognitive reflection that may sometimes undermine it[16–18]. We explore the varied origins of religious disbelief by analyzing these pathways simultaneously in a large nationally representative (USA, N= 1417) dataset with preregistered analyses. Combined, we find that witnessing fewer credible cultural cues of religious commitment is the most potent predictor of religious disbelief, β=0.28, followed distantly by reflective cognitive style, β= 0.13, and less advanced mentalizing, β= 0.05. Low cultural exposure to faith predicted about 90% higher odds of atheism than did peak cognitive reflection. Further, cognitive reflection predicted reduced religious belief only among individuals who witness relatively fewer credible contextual cues of faith in others. This work empirically unites four distinct literatures addressing the origins of religious disbelief, highlights the utility of considering both evolved intuitions and cultural evolutionary processes in religious transmission, emphasizes the dual roles of content- and context-biased social learning[19], and sheds light on the shared psychological mechanisms that underpin both religious belief and disbelief.
Factors Predicting Religious (Dis)belief
To assess the four different factors that may drive religious disbelief, we measured participants’ mentalizing abilities, feelings of existential security, exposure to credible cues of religiosity (CREDs), and reflective versus intuitive cognitive style.
We measured advanced mentalizing abilities, which correspond to mindblind atheism, using the Perspective Taking 293 Subscale of the Interpersonal Reactivity Index75. This measure includes items like “I try to look at everybody’s side of a disagreement before I make a decision” and “Before criticizing somebody, I try to imagine how I would feel if I were in their place,” measured on a scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree). This scale reached an acceptable level of reliability, α = 0.77, M = 4.79, SD = 0.78. We measured feelings of existential security, which corresponds to apatheism, with a number of items assessing concerns that are salient to participants and participant faith in institutions like the government, health care, and social security to provide aid in the face of need44. Items about the salience of different concerns included questions about how often participants worry about losing their job, worry about having enough money in the future, and feel they cannot afford things that are necessary. These items were assessed on a scale from 1 (never) to 4 (all the time). Illustrative items regarding faith in institutions include “How much do you feel confident in our country’s social security system” and “How much do you feel that people who start out poor can become wealthy if they work hard enough,” assessed on a scale from 1 (not at all) to 4 (a lot). Items measuring faith in institutions were reverse-scored, and all items were averaged together to form a composite index of existential insecurity (α = 0.77, M = 2.2, SD = 0.39), with higher scores reflecting more insecurity.
We measured cognitive reflection, which corresponds to analytic atheism, using nine items from the Cognitive Reflection Test76–78. This measure poses a series of questions to participants that rely on logical reasoning to answer correctly. All have a seemingly simple initial answer, but upon further consideration people arrive at a different (and correct) answer. We therefore measured whether or not participants provided the correct answers to these questions that require more cognitive reflection. If they answered a question correctly, they were given a 1, and if they answered it incorrectly, they were given a 0. Our full index of cognitive reflection is composed of the sum of the number of questions that each participant answered correctly, with a higher score thus indicating a more reflective and analytic cognitive style. The average score was 3.18, with a standard deviation of 2.66. We measured exposure to CREDs, which corresponds to inCREDulous 317 atheism, with the CREDs Scale10.
This scale assesses the extent to which caregivers demonstrated religious behaviors during the respondent’s childhood, such as going to religious services, acting as good religious role models, and making personal sacrifices to religion. The frequency of these types of behaviors was measured on a scale ranging from 1 (never) to 4 (always). This scale was highly reliable, α = 0.93, M = 2.42, SD = 0.84.
Abstract: Religion is a core feature of human nature, yet a comprehensive evolutionary approach toreligion must account for religious disbelief. Despite potentially drastic overreporting of religiosity[1], a third of the world’s 7+ billion human inhabitants may actually be atheists—merely people who do not believe in God or gods. The origins of disbelief thus present a key testing ground for theories of religion. Here, we evaluate the predictions of three prominent theoretical approaches to the origins of disbelief, and find considerable support for dual inheritance (gene-culture coevolution) approach. This dual inheritance model[2,3] derives from distinct literatures addressing the putative 1) core social cognitive faculties that enable mental representation of gods[4–7], 2) the challenges to existential security that motivate people to treat some god candidates as real and strategically important[8,9], 3) evolved cultural learning processes that influence which god candidates naïve learners treat as real rather than imaginary[3,10–12], and4) the intuitive processes that sustain belief in gods[13–15] and the cognitive reflection that may sometimes undermine it[16–18]. We explore the varied origins of religious disbelief by analyzing these pathways simultaneously in a large nationally representative (USA, N= 1417) dataset with preregistered analyses. Combined, we find that witnessing fewer credible cultural cues of religious commitment is the most potent predictor of religious disbelief, β=0.28, followed distantly by reflective cognitive style, β= 0.13, and less advanced mentalizing, β= 0.05. Low cultural exposure to faith predicted about 90% higher odds of atheism than did peak cognitive reflection. Further, cognitive reflection predicted reduced religious belief only among individuals who witness relatively fewer credible contextual cues of faith in others. This work empirically unites four distinct literatures addressing the origins of religious disbelief, highlights the utility of considering both evolved intuitions and cultural evolutionary processes in religious transmission, emphasizes the dual roles of content- and context-biased social learning[19], and sheds light on the shared psychological mechanisms that underpin both religious belief and disbelief.
Factors Predicting Religious (Dis)belief
To assess the four different factors that may drive religious disbelief, we measured participants’ mentalizing abilities, feelings of existential security, exposure to credible cues of religiosity (CREDs), and reflective versus intuitive cognitive style.
We measured advanced mentalizing abilities, which correspond to mindblind atheism, using the Perspective Taking 293 Subscale of the Interpersonal Reactivity Index75. This measure includes items like “I try to look at everybody’s side of a disagreement before I make a decision” and “Before criticizing somebody, I try to imagine how I would feel if I were in their place,” measured on a scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree). This scale reached an acceptable level of reliability, α = 0.77, M = 4.79, SD = 0.78. We measured feelings of existential security, which corresponds to apatheism, with a number of items assessing concerns that are salient to participants and participant faith in institutions like the government, health care, and social security to provide aid in the face of need44. Items about the salience of different concerns included questions about how often participants worry about losing their job, worry about having enough money in the future, and feel they cannot afford things that are necessary. These items were assessed on a scale from 1 (never) to 4 (all the time). Illustrative items regarding faith in institutions include “How much do you feel confident in our country’s social security system” and “How much do you feel that people who start out poor can become wealthy if they work hard enough,” assessed on a scale from 1 (not at all) to 4 (a lot). Items measuring faith in institutions were reverse-scored, and all items were averaged together to form a composite index of existential insecurity (α = 0.77, M = 2.2, SD = 0.39), with higher scores reflecting more insecurity.
We measured cognitive reflection, which corresponds to analytic atheism, using nine items from the Cognitive Reflection Test76–78. This measure poses a series of questions to participants that rely on logical reasoning to answer correctly. All have a seemingly simple initial answer, but upon further consideration people arrive at a different (and correct) answer. We therefore measured whether or not participants provided the correct answers to these questions that require more cognitive reflection. If they answered a question correctly, they were given a 1, and if they answered it incorrectly, they were given a 0. Our full index of cognitive reflection is composed of the sum of the number of questions that each participant answered correctly, with a higher score thus indicating a more reflective and analytic cognitive style. The average score was 3.18, with a standard deviation of 2.66. We measured exposure to CREDs, which corresponds to inCREDulous 317 atheism, with the CREDs Scale10.
This scale assesses the extent to which caregivers demonstrated religious behaviors during the respondent’s childhood, such as going to religious services, acting as good religious role models, and making personal sacrifices to religion. The frequency of these types of behaviors was measured on a scale ranging from 1 (never) to 4 (always). This scale was highly reliable, α = 0.93, M = 2.42, SD = 0.84.
Sunday, December 8, 2019
NL: Occupation with the highest life satisfaction was ship/aircraft controller; lowest life satisfaction was in forestry; highest for women was creative & performing artist, for men it was keyboard operator
Van Leeuwen, J. & Veenhoven, R. Would I be happier as a teacher or a carpenter? Erasmus Happiness Economics Research Organization EHERO, Working Paper 2019/4. https://personal.eur.nl/veenhoven/Pub2010s/2019n-full.pdf
ABSTRACT: Most people are looking for ways to make their life as happy as possible. Since we work a great part of our life time, it is worth knowing which occupations will bring us the most happiness and which will bring the least. This requires information on how happy people are in different occupations and in particular, what kinds of people are the happiest in what kinds of occupation. We sought answerers to these questions using data taken from the WageIndicator for 2006 to 2014 for the Netherlands. The large dataset of 160.806 respondents made it possible to assess differences in happiness levels in 130 occupations and to split the results across 4 personal characteristics. The occupation in the Netherlands with the highest life satisfaction was ship, aircraft controller and technician working in this field. The occupation in the Netherlands with the lowest life satisfaction was forestry and related work. The occupation giving the most life satisfaction for women was creative and performing artist, for men it was keyboard operator.
Key words: Happiness, Life-satisfaction, Occupational choice
4.2 Further research along this line
Replication on a more representative dataset
This research can be repeated with more recent data and with a more representative data set e.g. using the workforce survey of Statistics Netherlands (CBS, Dutch Labour Force Survey (LFS), 2019) This will reduce the effect of self-selection and remove the effects of the economic recession.
Replication on a larger dataset
The WageIndicator provides not only data for the Netherlands but has information for 93 countries (WageIndicator, 2019). Pooling data obtained in other developed countries will produce a much larger dataset than used here, which will allows us to consider more specific kinds of people.
Subsequent research can provide insights into cross-national differences in happiness across occupations around the world.
Replicate on job-satisfaction
It is also possible to investigate job-satisfaction in the same way we have investigated life-satisfaction in this study. Job-satisfaction in the case of the data of the WageIndicator needs to be transform to an equal scale with life-satisfaction, to make it possible to investigate its cohesion, or lack of, with life-satisfaction. In the case of job-satisfaction we also need to investigate further personal scales next to personal characteristics, incombination with the scales needed for each occupation.
Assess difference between job-satisfaction and life-satisfaction
Above in section 2.1, we noted that it is easier to estimate the degree of job-satisfaction one will experience in a particular occupation than to predict how that occupation will affect one’s wider life-satisfaction. It is therefore worth getting a view on the differences that exist between jobsatisfaction and life-satisfaction in occupations. Are there substantial differences? If so, which occupations provide more job-satisfaction than life-satisfaction and which more life-satisfaction than job-satisfaction?
A specific group to be considered in this context, are the people who work as entrepreneurs. Of course, a distinction can be made between various types of entrepreneurship. For example, self-employed entrepreneurs and family entrepreneurs. This group of workers has not been examined, but would be a good topic for future research, that is to look at the life-satisfaction and job-satisfaction of different entrepreneurs.
Assess effect of job characteristics
Receiving direct feedback from peers, customers, patients, students or engineered devices might lead to a higher life satisfaction compared to a more indirect feedback when actions taken do not provide feedback and one would have to rely on one’s own judgement of the quality of the output delivered. Besides, the variation of this effect over the course of one’s career could also be assessed.
Assess effect of pay
Based on the results presented here it is possible to look at occupations in a differed way, we can now look both at income-based results of work and, importantly at the effect of types of occupation on life-satisfaction. This means that it becomes possible to see payment as a compensation for lower life satisfaction, a new way to look at our working lives’.
ABSTRACT: Most people are looking for ways to make their life as happy as possible. Since we work a great part of our life time, it is worth knowing which occupations will bring us the most happiness and which will bring the least. This requires information on how happy people are in different occupations and in particular, what kinds of people are the happiest in what kinds of occupation. We sought answerers to these questions using data taken from the WageIndicator for 2006 to 2014 for the Netherlands. The large dataset of 160.806 respondents made it possible to assess differences in happiness levels in 130 occupations and to split the results across 4 personal characteristics. The occupation in the Netherlands with the highest life satisfaction was ship, aircraft controller and technician working in this field. The occupation in the Netherlands with the lowest life satisfaction was forestry and related work. The occupation giving the most life satisfaction for women was creative and performing artist, for men it was keyboard operator.
Key words: Happiness, Life-satisfaction, Occupational choice
4.2 Further research along this line
Replication on a more representative dataset
This research can be repeated with more recent data and with a more representative data set e.g. using the workforce survey of Statistics Netherlands (CBS, Dutch Labour Force Survey (LFS), 2019) This will reduce the effect of self-selection and remove the effects of the economic recession.
Replication on a larger dataset
The WageIndicator provides not only data for the Netherlands but has information for 93 countries (WageIndicator, 2019). Pooling data obtained in other developed countries will produce a much larger dataset than used here, which will allows us to consider more specific kinds of people.
Subsequent research can provide insights into cross-national differences in happiness across occupations around the world.
Replicate on job-satisfaction
It is also possible to investigate job-satisfaction in the same way we have investigated life-satisfaction in this study. Job-satisfaction in the case of the data of the WageIndicator needs to be transform to an equal scale with life-satisfaction, to make it possible to investigate its cohesion, or lack of, with life-satisfaction. In the case of job-satisfaction we also need to investigate further personal scales next to personal characteristics, incombination with the scales needed for each occupation.
Assess difference between job-satisfaction and life-satisfaction
Above in section 2.1, we noted that it is easier to estimate the degree of job-satisfaction one will experience in a particular occupation than to predict how that occupation will affect one’s wider life-satisfaction. It is therefore worth getting a view on the differences that exist between jobsatisfaction and life-satisfaction in occupations. Are there substantial differences? If so, which occupations provide more job-satisfaction than life-satisfaction and which more life-satisfaction than job-satisfaction?
A specific group to be considered in this context, are the people who work as entrepreneurs. Of course, a distinction can be made between various types of entrepreneurship. For example, self-employed entrepreneurs and family entrepreneurs. This group of workers has not been examined, but would be a good topic for future research, that is to look at the life-satisfaction and job-satisfaction of different entrepreneurs.
Assess effect of job characteristics
Receiving direct feedback from peers, customers, patients, students or engineered devices might lead to a higher life satisfaction compared to a more indirect feedback when actions taken do not provide feedback and one would have to rely on one’s own judgement of the quality of the output delivered. Besides, the variation of this effect over the course of one’s career could also be assessed.
Assess effect of pay
Based on the results presented here it is possible to look at occupations in a differed way, we can now look both at income-based results of work and, importantly at the effect of types of occupation on life-satisfaction. This means that it becomes possible to see payment as a compensation for lower life satisfaction, a new way to look at our working lives’.
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