Cultural evolution of emotional expression in 50 years of song lyrics

Cultural evolution of emotional expression in 50 years of song lyrics. Charlotte O. Brand, Alberto Acerbi, Alex Mesoudi. Evolutionary Human Sciences , Volume 1 , 2019 , e11. Nov 7 2019. https://doi.org/10.1017/ehs.2019.11

Abstract: Popular music offers a rich source of data that provides insights into long-term cultural evolutionary dynamics. One major trend in popular music, as well as other cultural products such as literary fiction, is an increase over time in negatively valenced emotional content, and a decrease in positively valenced emotional content. Here we use two large datasets containing lyrics from n = 4913 and n = 159,015 pop songs respectively and spanning 1965–2015, to test whether cultural transmission biases derived from the cultural evolution literature can explain this trend towards emotional negativity. We find some evidence of content bias (negative lyrics do better in the charts), prestige bias (best-selling artists are copied) and success bias (best-selling songs are copied) in the proliferation of negative lyrics. However, the effects of prestige and success bias largely disappear when unbiased transmission is included in the models, which assumes that the occurrence of negative lyrics is predicted by their past frequency. We conclude that the proliferation of negative song lyrics may be explained partly by content bias, and partly by undirected, unbiased cultural transmission.

Discussion

We analysed the emotional content of song lyrics in over 160,000 songs spanning the years 1965–2015. We found that the frequency of negative words increased over time, whilst the frequency of positive words decreased over time, and asked whether these patterns could be attributed to cultural transmission biases such as success bias, prestige bias, content bias or unbiased transmission. In the billboard dataset, containing top-100 songs from 1965 to 2015, we found an effect of unbiased transmission on positive lyrics, and an effect of content bias on negative lyrics. For the larger mxm databases we only found weak effects of unbiased transmission for both negative and positive lyrics.

The effects we found in all models are extremely small. This is partly because we analysed the data on the scale of each word, negating any need for averaging over lyrics and songs. Thus, the relative increase or decrease in the log odds is understandably small. Furthermore, our implementation of transmission biases is necessarily indirect and simplified given that we lack direct observations of song lyrics being copied. It is therefore unsurprising that the effects vastly reduced or disappeared when controlling for unbiased transmission, given how many other factors must be at play in the generation of song lyrics, both directional biases such as those we explored here and random processes (Bentley et al. 2007). For example, prestige can be realised in myriad ways (Jiménez and Mesoudi 2019), particularly in the music industry. The effect of various recording companies, the extent of media attention outside of the charts and the amount of money spent on music promotion may all play a significant role in an artist's apparent prestige, and is not necessarily restricted to the content of their music. Our implementation of ‘prestige’ as predominance in the charts therefore only captures one specific aspect of musical prestige.

The effect of unbiased transmission is, however, the largest and most consistent in all of our models. This result suggests there may be an effect of random drift, or random copying, in the emotional content of song lyrics over time. This is consistent with previous work showing that random copying can explain changes in the popularity of dog breeds, baby names and popular music (Bentley et al. 2007; Hahn and Bentley 2003), as well as archaeological pottery and technological patents (Bentley et al. 2004). Thus, rather than song-writers being influenced by the most prestigious or successful artists, they may simply be influenced by the emotional content of any of the available song lyrics in the previous timestep, which may happen to increase in negativity or decrease in positivity owing to small fluctuations. As in previous work, our results do not provide evidence of literal random copying by individuals as we do not have direct access to individual's copying decisions. Instead, random drift is posed as a baseline against which to compare evidence of other copying biases. It is possible that the population-wide patterns are not a result of unanimous random copying, but owing to a multitude of idiosyncratic causes that collectively cancel each other out to create the appearance of random copying (Hoppitt and Laland 2013). In this sense, any small fluctuation in negative words owing to a particular historical event, or owing to the emergence of a more negatively biased genre, may have caused an initial increase in negative lyrics, which became exacerbated by random drift.

The presence of a content bias in the likelihood of negative lyrics occurring in the billboard songs is noteworthy. This result suggests that songs with more negative lyrics are more successful in general, perhaps reflecting either a general negativity bias (Bebbington et al. 2017; Fessler et al. 2014) or an art-specific, or music-specific, negativity bias. Similar trends favouring negative emotions vs positive ones in other artistic domains support our finding. As mentioned above, Dodds and Danforth (2010) documented a decrease in frequency of positively valenced words, and an increase in negatively valenced ones in pop song lyrics (a similar result was found in DeWall et al. 2011). Morin and Acerbi (2017) found a similar pattern in centuries of literary fiction, with a general decrease in the frequency of words denoting emotions, explained by a decrease in words denoting positive emotions, whereas the frequency of negative words remained constant. It is worth noting that we were unable to look for content bias (with our implementation) in the mxm data as there was no ranking system. One possible way of determining the popularity or use of a song could be to look at how many times, or how often, its lyrics are searched for, and whether this correlates with negative content.

In general, the idea that negative emotions would be privileged in art is consistent with the hypothesis that artistic expressions may have an adaptive function, in particular as simulation of social interactions (Mar and Oatley 2008). According to this view, developed with literary fiction in mind but potentially generalisable to other expressive forms, art would provide hypothetical scenarios where we can test and train, with no risk, our cognitive and emotional reactions. From this perspective, simulating negative events is more useful than simulating positive ones (Clasen 2017; Gottschall 2012). Art expressing negative emotions, in addition, may hold more value for audiences seeking comfort from the knowledge that others also experience negative emotions. Indeed, studies have shown that people underestimate the prevalence of others’ negative emotions, and this underestimation exacerbates loneliness and decreases life satisfaction (Jordan et al. 2011). Furthermore, suppressing rather than reappraising negative emotions decreases self-esteem and increases sadness (Nezlek and Kuppens 2008)(Nezlek & Kuppens, 2008). This hypothesis is worth investigating in future research.

Our varying effects models suggested that most of the variation lay between artists. However, genre also showed considerable variation. We were unable to control for genre in the billboard data as genre information was not available with this dataset. This could provide a partial explanation for the differing results between the billboard and mxm datasets; indeed, Dodds and Danforth (2010) attributed the decrease in emotional valence within pop song lyrics to the emergence of more negative genres such as heavy metal and punk. Future work investigating the variation of emotional expression between different genres of music would be valuable. A further limitation of this study is that we restricted our analysis to comparing the content of each song with that of the songs from the previous three years of songs. Mechanistically this suggests that songs that are currently in the charts influence song-writers who are writing within three years of chart success, assuming that the time it takes to get from the song-writing process to chart success is three years or less. It is possible that these effects are stronger or weaker at different time points, such as within one or five years of chart success. Furthermore, although we controlled for artist, many songs in the billboard charts are in fact written by specially designated song-writers, such as Max Martin.

Overall this research contributes to the growing body of work attempting to quantitatively study trends in the domain of music (Youngblood 2019; Savage 2019; Mauch et al. 2015; Ravignani et al. 2017). Our starting result of an increase in negative emotions and decrease in positive ones in song lyrics is paired with similar findings regarding acoustic qualities. Using the same Billboard top-100 songs that we analysed, Schellenberg and von Scheve (2012) found an increase in minor mode and a decrease in the average tempo, which indicates that the songs become more sad-sounding through time. This seems to be part of a longer trend in Western classical music, where the use of the minor mode increased over a 150-year period from 1750 to 1900 (Horn and Huron 2015). The relationship between minor tone and negative valence of lyrics has been also studied, and confirmed, quantitatively (Kolchinsky et al. 2017). Analogously, studying more than 500,000 songs released in the UK between 1985 and 2015, Interiano et al. (2018) found a similar decrease in ‘happiness’ and ‘brightness’, coupled with a slight increase in ‘sadness’ (these high-level features result from algorithms analysing low-level acoustic features, such as the tempo, the tonality, etc.). They also found the puzzling result that, despite a general trend towards sadder songs, the successful hits are, on average, happier than the rest of the songs. In the same way, whereas we found that the higher the position in the billboard chart the more negative a song is, billboard songs are as a whole more positive than the songs in the mxm dataset, which contains more (and less successful) songs.

In this study we used cultural evolutionary theory to try to explain patterns in one of the most pervasive of human cultural practices, music production. More specifically, we tried to detect whether any particular transmission bias best explained the changing patterns of emotional expression over time. We conclude that, although we found weak evidence of success and prestige biases, these were overwhelmed by an effect for unbiased transmission. The presence of a content bias for negative lyrics remained, and this may be a contributing factor to the increasing in negative lyrics over time. A potential explanation for these results is that a multitude of transmission biases and other causes are at play. It is likely that small shifts, for example owing to historical events or the emergence of particular genres, may have nudged the production and transmission of negative and positive lyrics in opposite directions, and random copying exacerbated this trajectory. These possibilities should be explored more in future work. Overall, the exercise of precisely analysing large datasets to explain cultural change, if refined on relatively benign cultural trends such as pop music, could eventually be more expertly applied to areas of greater societal importance and impact, such as shifts in political beliefs or moral preferences.

Opinion: Expecting mothers to care for children with little support, while expecting fathers to provide for their families with little support, is likely to lead to adverse health consequences for mothers, fathers & children

Opinion: The male breadwinner nuclear family is not the ‘traditional’ human family, and promotion of this myth may have adverse health consequences. Rebecca Sear. Royal Society Philosophical Transactions B, June 21 2021, Volume 376, Issue 1827. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2020.0020

Abstract: The importance of social support for parental and child health and wellbeing is not yet sufficiently widely recognized. The widespread myth in Western contexts that the male breadwinner–female homemaker nuclear family is the ‘traditional’ family structure leads to a focus on mothers alone as the individuals with responsibility for child wellbeing. Inaccurate perceptions about the family have the potential to distort academic research and public perceptions, and hamper attempts to improve parental and child health. These perceptions may have arisen partly from academic research in disciplines that focus on the Western middle classes, where this particular family form was idealized in the mid-twentieth century, when many of these disciplines were developing their foundational research. By contrast, evidence from disciplines that take a cross-cultural or historical perspective shows that in most human societies, multiple individuals beyond the mother are typically involved in raising children: in evolutionary anthropology, it is now widely accepted that we have evolved a strategy of cooperative reproduction. Expecting mothers to care for children with little support, while expecting fathers to provide for their families with little support, is, therefore, likely to lead to adverse health consequences for mothers, fathers and children. Incorporating evidence-based evolutionary, and anthropological, perspectives into research on health is vital if we are to ensure the wellbeing of individuals across a wide range of contexts.

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What are the implications of a male breadwinner isolated nuclear family norm for health and wellbeing?

So there is considerable evidence that the idea that the ‘traditional’ human family is an isolated nuclear family, in which mothers are solely responsible for childcare and fathers solely responsible for providing for their families, is a myth. Isolated nuclear families, who raise children without help beyond the parental unit, barely seem to exist at all, even in 20th or 21st century Western societies, and male breadwinning is both rare and novel in our history. Myths about the ‘traditional’ family, and what ‘traditional’ maternal and paternal roles should look like, are likely to have real world implications. The assumption that mothers are primarily responsible for childrearing, that they should sacrifice themselves to invest intensively and over a long period in their children, may put considerable 12 pressure on women to behave in ways compatible with this difficult-to-attain, and novel, ideal of motherhood (Budds, this issue). Particularly damaging may be the idea that mothers should be able to cope with relatively little support. Research has shown that new mothers in the UK spend a significant proportion of their time alone with their infants (one study found 38% of mothers spent >8 hours a day alone, and 34% between 4-8 hours [80]). This is a situation which appears to be less than desirable in a social species which relies on cooperation to raise children, and on social learning for developing skills in a wide range of behaviours including parenting. Such isolation and the expectation that mothers should cope with little support is not likely to provide ideal childrearing conditions for either mother or child; for example, prompting maternal guilt where mothers feel they are not living up to this ideal [81,82], increased rates of postnatal depression [83] and decreased breastfeeding [84] in the absence of support, and other negative effects on mother’s wellbeing [85]. Assumptions about the adverse effect of the ‘breakdown’ of marriages, which idealise the nuclear family as the best way to raise children, and blame adverse child outcomes on the absence of such a family structure, have also led to government interventions aimed at persuading couples to marry rather than cohabit in the US [86]. These interventions tend to focus on socioeconomically disadvantaged groups because such groups have lower rates of marriage than more advantaged groups. A belief underlying these interventions appears to be that if disadvantaged groups can be made to form marital relationships which mirror the family structure of advantaged groups, then their disadvantage will melt away. Such interventions have attracted criticism, because a more effective way of reducing “bad family outcomes” is likely to be to tackle economic disadvantage itself, rather than a marker of disadvantage such as cohabitation [87]. These marriage interventions also don’t work. Public health initiatives around maternal and child health in lower and middle income countries typically also assume a default nuclear family structure in which mothers are largely responsible for the health of their children – this excludes vital support structures such as grandmothers (see Daniele, this issue). There are even some perceptions in global health that grandmothers are the ‘guardians of tradition’ [88] and that, if they have a role at all, it is a role which has the potential for negative maternal and health outcomes given that the advice of older women may contradict that of public health professionals. This echoes some of the findings from the literature on grandparental investment which suggests that input from grandparents may not always result in child outcomes which would be approved of by a public health professional. But even if older women’s advice does contradict that of public health professionals, they are typically very influential in decisions around 13 maternal and child health, which suggests it is even more important to incorporate older women into public health interventions [30]. The positive results in the handful of studies which have incorporated grandmothers and older women in public health initiatives suggest this would be a fruitful avenue for improving maternal and child health [88–91], and mental health (Dixon Chibanda’s ‘Friendship Bench’ is perhaps the best known example of a successful intervention employing ‘grandmothers’ [92,93]). Ideologies around the family and ‘traditional’ gender roles feed into political ideologies which promote hierarchies of male dominance over women. Online fora have facilitated the spread of misogynistic movements, including Mens’ Rights Activist groups and Incels (“involuntary celibates”), which are collectively referred to as the ‘manosphere’. These movements use and misuse evolutionary psychology as their theoretical justification, and draw on supposedly biological arguments that women are ‘designed’ to bear and raise children while men are ‘designed’ to do pretty much everything else in society [94,95]. These movements have led to fatal terrorist attacks [96,97]. These ideologies not only present a terrorist threat, but also do not seem to benefit the men who adopt them, given such ideologies sometimes promote ‘men going their own way’ and removing themselves from (female) society [98]. The cooperative nature of our species suggests that such isolationism may not suit our evolved preferences [99]. At a less extreme level, the male breadwinner norm promotes ideals of male independence and isolation from others, since it assumes that men should have the ability to entirely provision a wife and children without support, which may feed into gender norms and socialisation which have been popularly referred to as ‘toxic masculinity’. These include emphasis on male dominance and self-reliance, and are considered to be detrimental to men, women and children [100]. Finally, despite the belief in some circles that intensive mothering, and lengthy, dependent childhoods, is optimal for children, the little research on the impact of intensive mothering does not find clear and conclusive evidence that such parenting has substantial positive effects on children [101]. Such childhoods may even fail to allow children to develop some of the skills they need to succeed in adult life [102]. Children and adolescents typically lack opportunities to develop parenting skills in Western societies, for example, as they are no longer involved in caring for younger children. Hrdy [1] also cautions us that, if we are a species adapted to a strategy of cooperative reproduction, then mothers raising children with little support from others, and keeping children dependent on mothers for lengthy periods, may hamper children’s abilities to develop the social, cognitive and emotional skills they need to succeed in adult society:14 “If empathy and understanding develop only under particular rearing conditions, and if an everincreasing proportion of the species fails to encounter those conditions but nevertheless survives to reproduce, it won’t matter how valuable the underpinnings for collaboration were in the past. Compassion and the quest for emotional connection will fade away as surely as sight in cave-dwelling fish”

People with more male descendants of a reproductive age had more conservative attitudes on gender-related issues and more conformity to traditional norms

Male Descendant Kin Promote Conservative Views on Gender Issues and Conformity to Traditional Norms. Nicholas Kerry et al. Evolutionary Human Sciences, May 28 2021. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/evolutionary-human-sciences/article/male-descendant-kin-promote-conservative-views-on-gender-issues-and-conformity-to-traditional-norms/1D5CB4B349E74C365828C2F25B8E1530

Abstract: Political and social attitudes have been shown to differ by sex in a way that tracks individual  self-interest. We propose that these attitudes also change strategically to serve the best  interests of either male or female kin. To test this hypothesis, we developed a measure of  gendered fitness interests (GFI)—an index which reflects the sex, relatedness, and residual  reproductive value of close kin. We predicted that people with male-biased GFI (i.e., people  with more male kin of a reproductive age) would have more conservative attitudes towards gender-related issues (e.g., gender roles, women‘s rights, abortion rights). An online study using an American sample (N = 560) found support for this hypothesis. Further analyses  revealed that this relationship was driven not only by people‘s own sex and reproductive  value but also by those of their descendant kin. Exploratory analyses also found a positive  association between male-biased GFI and a measure of conformity, as well as a smaller association between male-biased GFI and having voted Republican in the last election. Both  these associations were statistically mediated by gender-related conservatism. These findings  are consistent with the hypothesis that GFI influences socio-political attitudes.

Keywords: gendered fitness interests; inclusive fitness; motivated cognition; gender roles; political attitudes; conservatism

Vitamin S: Why Is Social Contact, Even With Strangers, So Important to Well-Being?

Vitamin S: Why Is Social Contact, Even With Strangers, So Important to Well-Being? Paul A. M. Van Lange, Simon Columbus. Current Directions in Psychological Science, May 27, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1177/09637214211002538

Abstract: Even before COVID-19, it was well known in psychological science that people’s well-being is strongly served by the quality of their close relationships. But is well-being also served by social contact with people who are known less well? In this article, we discuss three propositions that support the conclusion that the benefits of social contact also derive from interactions with acquaintances and even strangers. The propositions state that most interaction situations with strangers are benign (Proposition 1), that most strangers are benign (Proposition 2), and that most interactions with strangers enhance well-being (Proposition 3). These propositions are supported, first, by recent research designed to illuminate the primary features of interaction situations. This research shows that situations with strangers often represent low conflict of interest. Also, in interactions with strangers, most people exhibit high levels of low-cost cooperation (social mindfulness) and, if the need is urgent, high levels of high-cost helping. We close by sharing research examples showing that even very subtle interactions with strangers yield short-term happiness. Broader implications for COVID-19 and urbanization are discussed.

Keywords: human cooperation, weak ties, strangers, COVID-19, well-being

Proposition 3: Most Interactions With Strangers Enhance Well-Being

Most research on social interaction and happiness has focused on people connected by a relationships, such as close partners, friends, or colleagues. However, there are a few exceptions. First, scientists who have advanced the importance of weak ties have shown that people who know quite a few people beyond their close network tend be happier than those with smaller networks of acquaintances. Possible reasons are that weak ties may facilitate connection with other people, may help a person obtain good advice or useful information, or may inspire a person to attain certain goals. For example, classic research showed that a large majority of people find a job through acquaintances that they have met only infrequently, and a quarter of those acquaintances are people they seldom see (Granovetter, 1973). And because people generally are in a good mood (Diener et al., 2015), encountering kindness is more likely than encountering unkindness, a phenomenon that may partially explain why people tend to be socially mindful and helpful toward strangers (Van Doesum et al., 2021). Recent studies on relational mobility similarly have found that people living in cultures in which it is easier to meet strangers and form new relationships tend to have greater well-being (e.g., Yuki & Schug, 2020).

Setting aside material or future benefits, we propose that social interactions with strangers fulfill the need for social contact. This idea is consistent with theoretical analyses emphasizing needs such as affiliation, need to belong, or relatedness (e.g., Baumeister & Leary, 1995; Van Lange & Rusbult, 2012). Various lines of research support this claim. For example, the strength of weak ties is supported in research on social exclusion, which has shown that explicit or implicit signs of exclusion by strangers cause stress or discomfort in people. Being excluded in a ball-tossing game, even one that is virtual, causes strong aversion (e.g., Williams et al., 2000), and being ignored as a passenger (“to be looked at as though air”) causes feelings of disconnection (Wesselmann et al., 2012). Thus, at the very least, feeling appreciated by and connected to strangers matters.

The literature on weak ties has traditionally focused on the instrumental value of networks or the personal and societal benefits derived from interactions with members of other social groups. However, even fleeting interactions as such may have benefits. For example, in a recent study, students and community members were asked to count the number of times they greeted another person, regardless of the duration of the interaction. This study showed the strength of weak ties in that having more day-to-day interactions with acquaintances was associated with greater feelings of belonging and subjective well-being (Sandstrom & Dunn, 2014a).

Moreover, experimental studies in which people are instructed to greet, smile, or initiate a very brief conversation—a single encounter—have demonstrated that such approach behaviors boost people’s happiness. Such benefits have been found in interactions with a bus driver, with fellow commuters on a bus or train, with a person selling cappuccino at a coffee shop, or simply with a fellow participant waiting to take part in an experiment (e.g., Epley & Schroeder, 2014; Gunaydin et al., 2021). Moreover, the short-term boost in happiness occurs not only in the person initiating the conversation, but also in the person whose social contact was sought (Epley & Schroeder, 2014).

Our basic premise has been that interactions among strangers are benign, because the situations are benign and the strangers are often benign, and because the gratification of social contact fulfills basic psychological needs. Figure 2 provides a graphic summary of these propositions. From this perspective, one may ask why people “need’ interaction with strangers, and how such interactions might complement interactions with family and friends. We propose three reasons that illustrate the added value of interactions with strangers. First, close others are often part of a network of family members or friends. Although such connections are psychologically safe in numerous ways, there is always a risk that sensitive, private information shared with one or two close others may be spread in the larger social network. Strangers are far less likely to spread private information because they are unlikely to be part of one’s social network.

[Fig. 2. Summary of the three propositions: Situations with strangers are benign (left panel), strangers are benign (middle panel), and situations with strangers contribute to happiness and psychological well-being (right panel).]

Second, strangers are more likely than family or friends to be dissimilar in their background, attitudes, or opinions. This may yield gains in information (e.g., exposure to new perspectives) and amusement or excitement (e.g., exposure to unusual, novel events; Lewandowski & Aron, 2004). Also, when interactions with strangers elicit agreement in opinions, people may derive both enjoyment and confidence from having their opinions confirmed by others outside of their own network (e.g., Nickerson, 1998).

Third, and finally, compared with interactions with family or close friends, interactions with strangers may have the benefit of being more likely to provide opportunities, such as suggestions or advice regarding job opportunities, a chance to learn broader skills, or a starting point for beneficial exchange or extension of one’s social network (e.g., Granovetter, 1973).

Although the social benefits of interactions with strangers—Vitamin S—may be quite universal (e.g., Gunaydin et al., 2021), we acknowledge that individual differences matter. Some evidence suggests that extraverted individuals are more optimistic than introverted individuals about an interaction with strangers, even though the benefits after the actual experience do not differ much (Zelenski et al., 2013). The important implication of this finding is that some people might seek out new interactions with strangers to a lesser extent than others, and thus benefit less from opportunities for such interactions. This may be true not only for introverted people, but also for people who tend be less happy than average (e.g., Sandstrom & Dunn, 2014b). And last but not least, it is possible that there is an optimal level of Vitamin S for most people, that is, a level of social contact beyond which the benefits decline.

People with the poorest bullshit detection performance grossly overestimate their detection abilities and significantly overplace those abilities compared to others

Littrell, Shane, and Jonathan A. Fugelsang. 2021. “The ‘bullshit Blind Spot’: The Roles of Overconfidence and Perceived Information Processing in Bullshit Detection.” PsyArXiv. May 27. doi:10.31234/osf.io/kbfrz

Abstract: The growing prevalence of misinformation (i.e., bullshit) in society carries with it an increased need to understand the processes underlying many people’s susceptibility to falling for it. Though several cognitive and metacognitive variables have been found to be associated with a greater propensity to falling for bullshit, little attention has been paid to people’s perceptions of and confidence in their own ability to detect it and the phenomenology of the thinking processes they employ when evaluating misleading information. Here we report two studies (N = 412) examining the associations between bullshit detection accuracy, confidence in one’s bullshit detection abilities, and the metacognitive experience of evaluating potentially misleading information. We find that people with the poorest bullshit detection performance grossly overestimate their detection abilities and significantly overplace those abilities compared to others. Additionally, highly bullshit receptive people reported using both intuitive and reflective thinking processes when evaluating misleading information. These results suggest that some people may have a “bullshit blind spot” and that traditional miserly processing explanations of receptivity to misleading information may be insufficient to fully account for these effects.

 

Altruism increases when resources and cultural values provide objective and subjective means for pursuing personally meaningful goals; the more so in more individualistic societies

Rhoads, Shawn A., Devon Gunter, Rebecca Ryan, and Abigail Marsh. 2021. “Global Variation in Subjective Well-being Predicts Seven Forms of Altruism.” PsyArXiv. April 27. doi:10.31234/osf.io/k3y7u

Abstract: The geographic prevalence of various altruistic behaviors (non-reciprocal acts that improve others' welfare) is non-uniformly distributed. But whether this reflects variation in a superordinate construct linked to national-level outcomes or cultural values is unknown. We compiled data on seven altruistic behaviors across 48-152 nations, and found evidence that these behaviors reflect a latent construct positively associated with national-level subjective well-being (SWB) and individualist values, even controlling for national-level wealth, health, education, and shared cultural history. Consistent with prior work, we found that SWB mediates the relationship between two objective measures of well-being (wealth and health) and altruism (N=130). Moreover, these indirect effects increase as individualist values increase within the subset of countries (N=90) with available data. Together, results indicate that altruism increases when resources and cultural values provide objective and subjective means for pursuing personally meaningful goals, and that altruistic behaviors may be enhanced by societal changes that promote well-being.

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On average, people in more individualist countries donate more in subjectively and objectively measured forms of altruistic behavior : haritable donations, volunteering, everyday helping, blood donations, living kidney donations, bone marrow donor registrations, and humane treatment of non-human animals.

Why Do Scientists Lie?

Why Do Scientists Lie? Liam Kofi Bright. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 89: How Do We Know? The Social Dimension of Knowledge , May 24 2021, pp. 117 - 129. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1358246121000102

Abstract: It's natural to think of scientists as truth seekers, people driven by an intense curiosity to understand the natural world. Yet this picture of scientists and scientific inquiry sits uncomfortably with the reality and prevalence of scientific fraud. If one wants to get at the truth about nature, why lie? Won't that just set inquiry back, as people pursue false leads? To understand why this occurs – and what can be done about it – we need to understand the social structures scientists work within, and how some of the institutions which enable science to be such a successful endeavour all things considered, also abet and encourage fraud.

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The study of scientific fraud and how it may be reduced thus offers the student of philosophy a chance to practice that integrative skill for which our discipline aspires to be known. It is said that philosophers wish to know how things, in the broadest possible sense, hang together, in the broadest possible sense. I hope to have persuaded you that in considering those places where science is coming apart at the seams, one may gain valuable practice in just this sort of broad perspective taking, and do so in a way that addresses an urgent problem of our times.

It’s easy to judge Wansink as a bad apple who cared too much for his career and not enough about the truth. But if the standard theory of fraud is even roughly correct, he was in some sense simply responding to the culture and institutions we have set up in academia. If you find people systematically breaking the rules the option is always available to you to shake your fists at them for their wicked ways and hope that sufficient moral condemnation will stem the tide of bad behaviour. But another option is to carefully study the social system giving rise to this behaviour, and with sleeves rolled up and an experimental attitude, get to work creating a better world.

Ejaculate adjustments occur when males modify their investment in sperm and nonsperm components; this strategy is expected to evolve when ejaculate production is costly; the phenomenon is widespread across taxa

Strategic adjustment of ejaculate quality in response to variation of the socio-sexual environment. Martina Magris. Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology volume 75, Article number: 91 (2021).  May 14 2021. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00265-021-03032-1

Abstract: Strategic ejaculate adjustments occur when males modify their investment in sperm and nonsperm components of the ejaculate according to the context. This strategy is expected to evolve when ejaculate production is costly, the returns of the investment in the ejaculate depend on the environment and environmental conditions are variable. While adjustments of sperm numbers have been widely documented, only recently we have begun to investigate how males modify ejaculate quality, despite the recognized importance of this factor for sperm competition. Here I discuss and synthetize existing literature on strategic adjustments of ejaculate quality. I describe which ejaculate quality traits are most typically plastic and which environmental factors elicit such responses, focusing especially on the socio-sexual environment. I summarize information on the timeframe within which adjustments can occur and on the proximate mechanisms responsible for plasticity. I show that this phenomenon is widespread across taxa; it involves responses to several environmental factors and modifications of many ejaculate traits, with seminal fluid composition playing a central role, as a trait per se and as proximate mechanism for sperm performance adjustments. I point out the circumstances favoring the evolution of ejaculate quality plasticity, and evaluate the fitness consequences of these responses, highlighting the complexity of patterns of covariation with other traits. Finally, I consider implications for male and female behavior. I highlight two areas of research on ejaculate plasticity that may be particularly worth exploring further: 1) the proximate mechanisms responsible for plasticity; 2) the adaptive value of strategic ejaculate adjustments.

The girls also adapt... Women show pre-copulatory mating preferences for human leucocyte antigen-dissimilar men; a possibility is that the ultimate mating bias towards HLA-dissimilar partners could occur after copulation, at the gamete level

Post-copulatory genetic matchmaking: HLA-dependent effects of cervical mucus on human sperm function. Annalaura Jokiniemi, Martina Magris, Jarmo Ritari, Liisa Kuusipalo, Tuulia Lundgren, Jukka Partanen and Jukka Kekהlהinen. Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences, August 2020. https://www.bipartisanalliance.com/2020/09/women-show-pre-copulatory-mating.html

Effect of high taxes and work-at-home technologies in relocation to other places

Glenn Kelman. May 2021. https://twitter.com/glennkelman/status/1397189637207121929

1 of 15: It has been hard to convey, through anecdotes or data, how bizarre the U.S. housing market has become. For example, a Bethesda, Maryland homebuyer working with @Redfin included in her written offer a pledge to name her first-born child after the seller. She lost.

2 of 15: There are now more Realtors than listings.

3 of 15: Inventory is down 37% year over year to a record low. The typical home sells in 17 days, a record low. Home prices are up a record amount, 24% year over year, to a record high. And still homes sell on average for 1.7% higher than the asking price, another record.

4 of 15: But in two of America’s largest cities, inventory has increased, in New York by 28%, in San Francisco by 77%. San Francisco hasn’t had an inventory increase this large since 2008. And still in both markets, prices are increasing.

5 of 15: In 2020, new-construction permits were *down* 13% in DC and New York, 40% in LA, 48% in Chicago, 50% in Seattle, 79% in San Francisco. Permits were *up* 25% in Miami, 56% in Vegas, 96% in Greenville, 122% in Detroit, 246% in Knoxville.

6 of 15: Lumber prices are up 300%.

7 of 15: In Redfin’s annual survey of nearly 2,000 homebuyers, 63% reported having bid on a home they hadn’t seen in person.

8 of 15: In an April survey of 600 http://Redfin.com users who had relocated in the past year, about two thirds of the people who moved got a house the same size or bigger, but about the same proportion, two thirds, spent the same or *less* on housing.

9 of 15: Even though most of the people who moved got a bigger home, 78% reported having the same or more disposable income after their move. Idaho home prices could triple and still seem affordable to a Californian.

10 of 15: For low-tax states, 4 people move in for every 1 who leaves. For Texas, this ratio is 5:1; for Florida, 7:1. Cites & states have no leverage to raise taxes, after many promised new money for social justice; the federal government will have to fund long-term investments.

11 of 15: This migration to lower-cost areas may lead to lower workforce participation. For many families @Redfin has relocated, the money saved on housing costs lets one parent stop working. A wave of Redfin customers are retiring early.

12 of 15: Lenders are calling employers to confirm that the homebuyer will have permission to work remotely when the pandemic ends. Rates are lower for loans on primary residences, and the lender also wants to make sure the borrower actually plans to work after getting the loan.

[...]

14 of 15: it’s not just income that’s k-shaped, but mobility. 90% of people earning $100,000+ per year expect to be able to work virtually, compared to 10% of those earning $40,000 or less per year. The folks who need low-cost housing the most have the least flexibility to move.

[...]

Rolf Degen summarizing... Contrary to earlier views, the big five personality traits are distributed largely evenly across the different social classes

Hughes, Bradley T., Cory K. Costello, Joshua Pearman, Pooya Razavi, Cianna Bedford-Petersen, Rita M. Ludwig, and Sanjay Srivastava. 2021. “The Big Five Across Socioeconomic Status: Measurement Invariance, Relationships, and Age Trends.” PsyArXiv. May 26. doi:10.31234/osf.io/wkhfx

Abstract: Associations between socioeconomic status (SES) and personality traits have important implications for theory and application. Progress in understanding these associations depends on valid measurement, unbiased estimation, and careful assessment of generalizability. In this registered report, we used data from AIID, a large online study, to address three basic questions about personality and SES. First, we evaluated the measurement invariance of a common measure of personality, the Big Five Inventory, across indicators of educational attainment, income, and occupational prestige. Fit indices showed some instances of detectable noninvariance, but with little practical impact on substantive results. Second, we estimated associations between SES and personality. Results showed that personality and SES were largely independent (most rs < .1), in contrast to predictions derived from several previous studies. Third, we tested whether age trends in personality were moderated by SES. Results did not support predictions from social investment theory, but they did suggest that age trends were largely generalizable across SES. We discuss the implications of these findings for developing and validating personality measures for use in diverse samples. We also discuss the implications for theories that propose that the Big Five are responsive to, or partially responsible for, people’s economic and social conditions.

“Agriculturally-coinciding” festivals (those that coincide with peak planting or harvest months) have negative effects on household income 6 other development outcomes; but also lead to higher religiosity & social capital

Religious Festivals and Economic Development: Evidence from Catholic Saint Day Festivals in Mexico. Eduardo Montero & Dean Yang. NBER Working Paper 28821, May 2021. DOI 10.3386/w28821

Societies worldwide spend substantial resources celebrating religious festivals. How do festivals influence economic and social outcomes? We study Catholic patron saint day festivals in Mexico, exploiting two features of the setting: (i) municipal festival dates vary across the calendar and were determined in the early history of towns after Spanish conquest, and (ii) there is considerable variation in the intra-annual timing of agricultural seasons. We compare municipalities with “agriculturally-coinciding” festivals (those that coincide with peak planting or harvest months) to other municipalities, examining differences in long-run economic development and social outcomes. Agriculturally-coinciding festivals have negative effects on household income and other development outcomes. They also lead to lower agricultural productivity and higher share of the labor force in agriculture, consistent with agriculturally-coinciding festivals inhibiting the structural transformation of the economy. Agriculturally-coinciding festivals also lead to higher religiosity and social capital, potentially explaining why such festivals persist in spite of their negative growth consequences.

This study is the first systematic review and meta-analysis to examine changes in domestic violence incidents from pre- to post-lockdown periods; results show moderate to strong increase in domestic violence incidents

Domestic violence during the COVID-19 pandemic - Evidence from a systematic review and meta-analysis. Alex R. Piquero et al. Journal of Criminal Justice, Volume 74, May–June 2021, 101806. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcrimjus.2021.101806

Highlights

• Crime changed from pre- to post-COVID-19 lockdown periods.

• Limited evidence shows an increase in domestic violence.

• This study is the first systematic review and meta-analysis to examine changes in domestic violence incidents from pre- to post-lockdown periods.

• Results show moderate to strong increase in domestic violence incidents between pre- and post-lockdown periods.

Abstract

Purpose: The aim of this review was to estimate the effect of COVID-19-related restrictions (i.e., stay at home orders, lockdown orders) on reported incidents of domestic violence.

Methods: A systematic review of articles was conducted in various databases and a meta-analysis was also performed. The search was carried out based on conventional scientific standards that are outlined in the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis Protocols (PRISMA-P) and studies needed to meet certain criteria.

Results: Analyses were conducted with a random effects restricted maximum likelihood model. Eighteen empirical studies (and 37 estimates) that met the general inclusion criteria were used. Results showed that most study estimates were indicative of an increase in domestic violence post-lockdowns. The overall mean effect size was 0.66 (CI: 0.08–1.24). The effects were stronger when only US studies were considered.

Conclusion: Incidents of domestic violence increased in response to stay-at-home/lockdown orders, a finding that is based on several studies from different cities, states, and several countries around the world.

Keywords: Meta-analysisCOVID-19Domestic violenceLockdowns

4. Discussion

The purpose of this study was to examine whether policies implemented to reduce the spread of the coronavirus, namely stay-at-home or lockdown orders, were associated with any changes in domestic violence using administrative/official pre-post records. Our work was focused on systematically reviewing the literature on any potential changes in domestic violence after restrictions were put into place.

Following systematic review protocol, our initial research started with over 22,000 records identified through database searches as being potentially eligible for inclusion. After our eligibility criteria were imposed, we ended with 18 studies that were included in the systematic review, which is substantively similar to many such reviews in the criminological literature. These 18 studies yielded a total of 37 estimates, the results of which showed an overwhelming increase (pre-post) in reports of domestic violence. Specifically, 29 of the 37 study estimates showed a significant increase. Finally, our forest plot of the distribution of effect size estimates, based on the information necessary to perform such calculations (12 studies and 17 effect sizes), showed an overall medium effect size of 0.66. In short, the evidence is strong that incidents of domestic violence increased in response to stay-at-home/lockdown orders, a finding that is based on several studies from different cities, states, and several countries around the world.

To be sure, while our results rely on the available research that met our inclusion criteria that exists at this time, it remains a sampling of the work that is being done and not yet known. As well, much of the early work that has focused on crime changes in response to the pandemic-related lockdown orders relies on short windows of observations, a few weeks or months. But this is true of the publication process, whereby the time an article has gone through review and published many months have passed since the researchers finalized their data collection. Therefore, continued follow-ups are needed to add to and update our database going forward. Another limitation of our work is that the database relies mainly from U.S. studies, in large part because those are the studies that fit the criteria outlined in our search parameters. We know, for example, that domestic violence is a serious problem in the Americas, and in particular in Low and Middle Income Countries (LMIC) where there is a significant amount of violence, but little is noted in administrative data nor is there much help to aid victims. As a consequence, we anticipate that when researchers carry out sustained analyses of domestic violence in LMIC countries, they will likely uncover a devasting toll on women and children. Lastly, our work relies on official records, which suffer from a variety of problems. At the same time, other sources of domestic violence data, such as self-reports, have tended to show some short-term increases in domestic violence as well (Jetelina, Knell, & Molsberry, 2021). Additional work is needed to assess whether there are enough studies in that line of work to perform a similar analysis to the one carried out in this study. The same is true from the data reports from service providers (Pfitzner, Fitz-Gibbon, Meyer, & True, 2020). The more we can triangulate the data on domestic violence as a result of lockdown orders to gain a more complete picture of changes in victimization experiences, the better and more confident our penultimate conclusions can be.

5. Conclusion and policy implications

The results of this study underscore the importance of increasing the knowledge base about domestic violence, as there have been concerns raised by public health leaders, victim/survivor advocates, women's and children's groups, activists, and policymakers around the world about the potential significant spike in abuse related to the pandemic (see e.g., the Lancet Commission on Gender-Based Violence and Maltreatment of Young People, Knaul, Bustreo, & Horton, 2020). The global economic impact of COVID-19, record levels of unemployment, added stressors in the home—including the care and home schooling of children, financial instability, and illness or death caused or exacerbated by the virus—combined with the mental health toll of social distancing measures required by the epidemiological response, have undermined the decades of progress made in reducing the extent and incidence of domestic violence. In turn, the results of this systematic review call for significant attention to the policy responses and resources that are needed to attend to victims and survivors of domestic abuse that may not be getting the services they need. In particular, Galea, Merchant, and Lurie (2020) note the need to direct resources to historically marginalized groups and those likely to be disproportionately isolated during the pandemic, including older adults, women, and children with past experiences with violence and abuse, and those with ongoing mental illness and chronic health conditions—and it is certainly possible that these effects are magnified for women and children of color, immigrants or refugees, and/or households that speak a language other than English. In addition, the gendered impacts of the pandemic will be far-reaching and in need of sustained research and policy attention (Wenhma, Smith, & Morgan, 2020), especially those programs and policies that are the intersection between women and children such as income transfer programs.

It is also important for our response to domestic violence during the COVID-19 pandemic to learn from the lessons of responding to previous health crises, natural disasters, and major disruptions that may offer direction and guidance (Sánchez et al., 2020). There is strong evidence to suggest that women's physical and mental health, including the risk of first-time or escalating domestic violence, is connected to the consequences of natural disasters and epidemics, including social isolation, economic instability, and increasing relationship and family conflict (Campbell & Jones, 2016; Parkinson, 2019).

The governor of Puerto Rico recently declared a state of emergency related to gender-based violence, noting it to be a serious social and public health problem that has gotten worse as a function of the territory's economic turmoil, Hurricane Maria, and now the COVID-19 pandemic (Florido, 2021). Similar to Puerto Rico, there needs to be equally strong global, federal, and state level leadership to make these bold and decisive declarations, but also commitments to expand victims' access to health and support services and economic resources directed to families during and after the pandemic. We must look to collaborative and creative thinking, as well as to skilled and experienced victim advocates who have been providing and building upon increasingly evidence-based services for over four decades, on how to expand the availability and diversity of these services and resources, particularly transitional housing options for victims who may have contracted or been exposed to COVID-19. For those victims who report to law enforcement, there will be a need for more intensive police, social services, and victim advocacy follow-up both during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Research will also need to explore whether the pandemic's impact on the incidence of domestic violence is sustained in the long-term.

While this systematic review provides strong evidence of increased officially reported domestic violence as a consequence of the COVID-19 stay-at-home and lockdown orders, the exact nature and context of the increase remains unknown. Increased reporting to the police, emergency rooms, and other healthcare settings may be a function of an increased number of victimizations, but also an increase in the decisions by some victims to call the police and seek criminal justice interventions. That is, changes in official reporting rates reflect both a change in extent of victimization experiences, but also the help-seeking decisions of those who were victims of domestic violence prior to and during the pandemic. The increase may include reports by a new set of domestic violence victims whose violence experiences are largely a function of the current economic impact of the pandemic, as well as the temporary isolation resulting from social distancing measures and stay-at-home orders (e.g., the abuse they experienced pre-pandemic was largely emotional in nature and circumstances surrounding the pandemic escalated that emotional control to acts of physical violence). The pandemic may have also served as the catalyst for those who were victims prior to the pandemic to report their experiences due to the increased incidence and severity of violence by their previously abusive partners.

While the findings in this study note increases in officially reported domestic violence, the direction of future research needs to include careful joint analyses of estimates from police agencies, shelter-based and clinical data, and self-report victimization data before, during, and after the COVID-19 pandemic to estimate the diverse types and context of domestic violence and also examine the ways in which the pandemic have placed women at further risk for physical violence, emotional and financial abuse, and coercive control in the long-term. Chandan et al. (2020) note that the selection bias associated with police, healthcare, and other administrative datasets consistently underestimate the extent and impact of domestic violence, a well-established finding in research before the pandemic. They conclude that without ongoing data collection and surveillance, it will not be possible to estimate the total burden of domestic violence both during and after the pandemic.

The stay-at-home measures have placed those most vulnerable to violence and abuse in close proximity to their potential abuser, and this may lead to a continued increase in the risk factors associated with domestic violence. The cause of this increase is likely to be shaped by a variety of factors that are associated with domestic violence more generally, but that have and will continue to be more prevalent during the COVID-19 pandemic. This includes social isolation and increased attempts by abusers to exert power and coercive control, unemployment, economic distress, marital conflict, and substance use and abuse. The financial stress associated with the COVID-19 pandemic has been unprecedented and is likely to disproportionately impact victims and survivors of domestic violence in the long-term. Women's economic dependence on male partners will continue to place many women at risk for new and continued domestic violence. Moreover, the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on unemployment among women, which is estimated to be four times greater for women as compared to men (Sasser Modestino, 2020; Tappe, 2020), along with their increasing responsibility for childcare and home-schooling, will exacerbate the financial challenges of women trying to navigate leaving violent relationships. Patrick et al. (2020) have identified a number of other financial stressors related to the pandemic, including increased food insecurity, decreased employer-sponsored insurance coverage for their children, and the loss of regular childcare leading to women's increasing unemployment, which in turn will lead to devastating impacts for domestic violence victims. Kashen, Glynn, and Novello (2020) point to the need for immediate and long-term action in the area of work-family policies and childcare infrastructure in order to mitigate these impacts.

Increases in domestic violence during the pandemic will also take a tremendous toll on the children living in violent homes and those directly exposed to domestic violence and abuse. As Phelps and Sperry (2020) note, for many children, schools are their only option for mental health services and trauma-informed care and support—not to mention adequate nutrition. It will therefore be important to direct research to examine the impact of the increase in domestic violence during the pandemic on children, given the well-established research on the diverse impacts of family violence on children, and the literature pointing to the intergenerational transmission of violence (Spatz-Widom, 1989). Research has already demonstrated the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic among parents and children with respect to social isolation, loneliness, and depression. Research by Patrick et al. (2020) finds that in the year since the beginning of the pandemic, a quarter of parents reported worsening mental health for themselves and a 14% worsening in the behavioral health of their children. They find that the combined impact of lack of child-care due to school closures, reduced access to healthcare due to closures and delays in visits, and declines in food security led to the most substantial declines in a family's mental and behavioral health. It is clear that these negative economic circumstances and declining mental health among parents and children, combined with the trauma of violence exposure, are likely to have substantial detrimental impacts for children long-term.

Researchers and policy makers will need to identify both the short- and long-term implications of the COVID-19 pandemic on the risk for domestic violence and subsequent consequences. This includes an understanding of the nature of domestic violence and types of victimizations that come to the attention of the police, and how police agencies may better address this changing crime problem, as well as those that do not get reported to law enforcement and how to address those situations. For those victims reporting their victimization experiences to the police, but choosing—or being forced—to remain with their abuser, there will be a need for more intensive law enforcement, social services, and victim advocacy follow-up both during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Federal governments will need to ensure that financial stimulus packages aimed at reducing the economic impact of the pandemic on families also include targeted resources for women and children leaving violent homes, and at the same time earmark resources for victim service and healthcare providers seeing an increase in their caseloads related to domestic violence during and after the pandemic. Boserup, McKenney, and Elkbuli (2020) note the importance of making screening tools and assessments for domestic violence more readily available in diverse community, clinical, and healthcare settings, particularly via telehealth. This may also include collaboration between COVID-19 testing and vaccination sites and police agencies and domestic violence response organizations to include abuse screenings and safety planning. Finally, there will need to be creative approaches to reaching out to those women and children most at risk and often least likely to come to the attention of official agencies and victim response organizations. This includes the expansion of telehealth and remote victim services, expansion of team-based behavioral response units, and the development of innovative referral systems for any and all agencies and providers responding to calls for help from victims and survivors experiencing abuse in their home.

Participants’ intention to vote for male candidates increased with age until candidates were about 45 years old and then slightly decreased. In contrast, participants’ intention to vote for female candidates consistently decreased with candidates’ age

How Candidates’ Age and Gender Predict Voter Preference in a Hypothetical Election. Yiqin Alicia Shen, Yuichi Shoda. Psychological Science, May 21, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797620977518

Abstract: Are preferences for political candidates influenced by how old they appear to be? Amazon Mechanical Turk workers and undergraduate students were shown photos of 93 state legislators as candidates in hypothetical elections. Other information about the candidates (e.g., party affiliation) was held constant, randomized, or not presented. For very young candidates (< 35 years old), participants favored women over men. However, participants’ intention to vote for male candidates increased with age until candidates were about 45 years old and then slightly decreased. In contrast, participants’ intention to vote for female candidates consistently decreased with candidates’ age. Perceived attractiveness and warmth accounted for some of the gender differences in the effect of candidates’ perceived age.

Keywords: age, gender, voting, preregistered

The alcohol harm paradox: The hoi polloi suffer from higher rates of alcohol-related harm compared with advantaged groups, despite reporting similar or lower levels of consumption on average

Causal mechanisms proposed for the alcohol harm paradox—a systematic review. Jennifer Boyd, Olivia Sexton, Colin Angus, Petra Meier, Robin C. Purshouse, John Holmes. Addiction, May 17 2021. https://doi.org/10.1111/add.15567

Abstract

Background and Aims: The alcohol harm paradox (AHP) posits that disadvantaged groups suffer from higher rates of alcohol-related harm compared with advantaged groups, despite reporting similar or lower levels of consumption on average. The causes of this relationship remain unclear. This study aimed to identify explanations proposed for the AHP. Secondary aims were to review the existing evidence for those explanations and investigate whether authors linked explanations to one another.

Methods: This was a systematic review. We searched MEDLINE (1946–January 2021), EMBASE (1974–January 2021) and PsycINFO (1967–January 2021), supplemented with manual searching of grey literature. Included papers either explored the causes of the AHP or investigated the relationship between alcohol consumption, alcohol-related harm and socio-economic position. Papers were set in Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development high-income countries. Explanations extracted for analysis could be evidenced in the empirical results or suggested by researchers in their narrative. Inductive thematic analysis was applied to group explanations.

Results: Seventy-nine papers met the inclusion criteria and initial coding revealed that these papers contained 41 distinct explanations for the AHP. Following inductive thematic analysis, these explanations were grouped into 16 themes within six broad domains: individual, life-style, contextual, disadvantage, upstream and artefactual. Explanations related to risk behaviours, which fitted within the life-style domain, were the most frequently proposed (n = 51) and analysed (n = 21).

Conclusions: While there are many potential explanations for the alcohol harm paradox, most research focuses on risk behaviours while other explanations lack empirical testing.

Discussion

This review examined explanations for the AHP to identify potential pathways and mechanisms which result in differential risk of harm between SEP groups. This is a new approach, and goes beyond previous systematic reviews and meta-analyses which have so far established the existence of the AHP and the contribution of alcohol to this relationship [3, 18]. We identified 16 themes within six domains used to explain the AHP. Risk behaviours were the most prevalent explanations. This finding, paired with the dominance of the behavioural paradigm in empirical work, suggests that there has been a reliance upon using risk behaviour to understand the AHP. Evidence found in this review opposed the idea that the AHP was an artefact. There were many other, mainly hypothetical, explanations for the AHP proposed in the literature. This included individual-level mechanisms (e.g. biological or psychological), contextual factors (e.g. place-based factors), the lived experience of disadvantage and upstream structural factors (e.g. the economy and politics). In part, this reflects an awareness that the AHP is complex; there is no simple explanation, and researchers do not view causes in isolation. However, it remains unclear why other re-occurring explanations (e.g. social support or access to health care) have been neglected, while researchers frequently return to risk behaviours. This is particularly puzzling, given that quantitative evidence suggests that risk behaviours only play a partial role [4, 47].

There are two potential reasons for this: theoretical and methodological. Study of the AHP is rooted in alcohol epidemiology, which singularly focuses upon the causes and effects of alcohol consumption [65]. More broadly, the field of epidemiology has faced criticism regarding its approach to understand population health. One of the earliest critiques by Krieger points to fundamental errors in developing epidemiological methods rather than theory, with greater weight given to proximal risk factors and a focus upon causes without context [66]. These limitations have led to an emphasis upon individual disease susceptibility and individual-level interventions. Instead, Krieger argues that the eco-social perspective (the idea that biology and biological changes are shaped by the social environment) should be used to understand health [66]. Concerns regarding how causation is viewed in epidemiology have persisted in contemporary public health, with similar criticisms raised more recently [67]. These concerns continue, despite efforts to raise the profile of theories such as the eco-social perspective and calls to adopt pluralist approaches to causality in epidemiology, which stipulate that causation is not a single connection between two things, but the context in which a causal relationship is observed plays a role [67]. Adopting such an approach would change the way alcohol researchers conceptualize and investigate the AHP.

The lack of clear theoretical structuring in epidemiology, which is argued to have led to a focus upon proximal risk factors (e.g. risk behaviours), could also be a symptom of a lack of methods to carry out more complex analyses of distal factors. Possible solutions to this include the use of complex system modelling methods, which have gained traction within public health and are now being implemented in a UK-based project to gain insight into the causal relationships between policy and health-related outcomes [68]. Software architecture has also recently been devised to address how theory can be systematically incorporated into individual-level and agent-based computer simulations to understand health and health behaviours [69]. Applying these computer simulation methods to the AHP could provide the opportunity to shift the empirical focus from risk behaviours to wider determinants, as they can capture complexity and are mechanism-based rather than focused upon testing relationships between variables.

Strengths and limitations

This is the first review, to our knowledge, to catalogue explanations provided for the AHP across a breadth of literature. In taking a broad approach to literature searching and inclusion criteria it was possible to review work from multiple disciplines employing varied methodologies. This led to the identification of a varied set of explanations. However, it is possible that some explanations are more appropriate, depending upon the study design, population and measure of harm. As the primary aim of this review was to collate and review explanations more generally, we did not conduct an in-depth exploration of this issue. However, upon examination there was no evidence that study design or population influenced which explanations were presented. In terms of measures, we found one clear example of an explanation only applicable when using a subjective measure of alcohol harm—those in low SEP groups who drink may feel their outcomes are worse because their peers are more likely to be abstainers [8]. This issue awaits further examination.

This review was restricted to high-income countries. The results and conclusions are therefore only applicable to this context. Furthermore, most papers focused upon the United Kingdom, which may limit generalizability. This was justified, given substantial differences in alcohol environments. However, given that alcohol is a global issue [1], future research should gain insight into how alcohol affects the disadvantaged in low–middle-income countries to help address the deepening of local and global health inequalities.

Another limitation is that only one reviewer screened and extracted data from the papers. We recruited an independent researcher to re-assess a sample of papers for inclusion and extraction. Cross-checking between the two reviewers demonstrated good reliability.

Research and policy implications

The lack of explicit theory used to present explanations is a barrier to understanding the causes of the AHP. The development or application of theory may be fundamental to identify the true causal mechanisms which create and sustain the AHP. Several explanations have been proposed which align with the vast literature detailing theories of health inequality more generally. The eco-social perspective, among those more commonly discussed [e.g. the materialist (the link between wealth and resources and health) or political economy perspective (the idea that risk factors for health inequalities are rooted in structures)] [70], are just some examples of health inequality theory which could be applied to understand the AHP.

The AHP is well-evidenced, and behavioural-related explanations play a partial role. However, these explanations fall short in understanding the complex causes of inequalities in alcohol-related harm. There is a current lack of evidence investigating other explanations found in this review, which makes it difficult to suggest potential interventions to mitigate the AHP. Future research should empirically investigate these alternative explanations for the AHP. Computer simulations models offer one potential way of achieving this aim in the short term and for relatively low cost.

Based on the evidence from this review, the key policy implication is that tackling drinking alone will not reduce inequalities in alcohol-related harm. While there is some evidence that improving multiple health behaviours may attenuate the risk of alcohol-related harm, it is critical that policymakers look to policies outside the scope of public health to mitigate the inequality produced by the paradox.