Appearance dissatisfaction is a sensitive issue and has been tied to depression, dissatisfaction in romantic relationships, and reduced sexual satisfaction

Øverup CS, Strizzi JM, Cipric A, et al. Appearance Satisfaction as a Predictor of Specific Sexual Problems and Associated Distress. J Sex Med 2021;XX:XXX–XXX. Aug 2 2021. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jsxm.2021.06.019

Abstract

Introduction: Appearance dissatisfaction is a sensitive issue and has been tied to depression, dissatisfaction in romantic relationships, and reduced sexual satisfaction.

Aim: This study sought to examine associations between appearance satisfaction and specific sexual problems and related distress, testing also the moderating role of relationship satisfaction.

Methods: A large web-sample of Norwegians in romantic relationships (N = 2,903) completed a one-time survey.

Outcomes: Participants reported on their experience of five different sexual problems and associated level of distress.

Results: We found that appearance satisfaction was associated with reporting fewer sexual problems, and specifically, with a smaller likelihood of experiencing problems with lack of enjoyment, lack of excitement, and lack of climax. Furthermore, appearance satisfaction was unrelated to overall sexual problem-related distress, but was associated with feeling less distress about lack of excitement and lack of climax. Relationship satisfaction did not serve as a moderator of the associations.

Clinical Translation: These findings suggest the importance of attending to appearance satisfaction when working with clients with multiple sexual problems, particularly those related to excitement and enjoyment.

Strengths and Limitations: Strengths of the study include a large sample of partnered adults and assessment of specific sexual problems and associated distress. A limitation is that outcomes were assessed using single items, rather than multi-item scales.

Conclusion: The study highlights the importance of examining the presence of sexual problems and associated distress separately, and to consider appearance satisfaction as a predictor of sexual functioning.

Key Words: Appearance satisfactionBody satisfactionBMISexual problemsSexual dysfunctionSexual distressRelationship satisfaction

Discussion

The current study is among the first to examine associations between appearance satisfaction and specific sexual problems and associated distress, as well as the cumulative number of sexual problems and overall distress related to any/multiple sexual problems, in a large sample of partnered Norwegian adults. A particular strength of the current study is the ability to look at the presence of specific sexual problems and the associated distress, as opposed to only general assessments of sexual functioning. Indeed, research highlights the distinction between sexual satisfaction and sexual difficulties,59,60 and that people who experience sexual problems may not necessarily experience distress related to those problems, especially at older age.28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37 Moreover, much existing research has examined physiological predictors of sexual functioning, with a lesser focus on psychosocial factors. However, burgeoning research has begun to examine relational predictors of functioning and associated distress, putting sexual functioning squarely in the domain of relational functioning. The current research adds to this burgeoning field of study, by examining both psychological (appearance satisfaction) and social (relationship satisfaction) factors. In sum, it is important to examine the presence of sexual problems and the level of distress related to sexual problems separately, to understand the potentially disparate predictive ability of various factors, including psychosocial factors.

Number of Sexual Problems and the Presence of Specific Sexual Problems

Results demonstrated that appearance satisfaction was associated with reporting fewer sexual problems (H2), and specifically, with a smaller likelihood of reporting problems with sexual lack of enjoyment, excitement, and climax (H3). These findings are consistent with past research that has found that acceptance of one's body is associated with more sexual enjoyment,17 and that feeling negative about one's body is associated with decrements in orgasm,18,19 and overall sexual functioning61. Interestingly, and contrary to past research,17 we did not find an association between appearance satisfaction and lack of sexual interest (H3). It is unclear why we did not find this association; however, in the present sample, lack of interest was relatively common, with 30% of people endorsing this problem. Thus, it may be that other factors play a larger role than does appearance satisfaction in predicting whether people experience a lack of sexual interest. Factors may include age or sample population. Fooken used a sample of elderly women, while our study included both men and women of all ages.17

We also did not find that appearance satisfaction was associated with feeling anxious during sex (H3). It is noteworthy that only 4% of the sample endorsed this problem, and thus, there may have been too little variability in this sample to examine the association. Conversely, it may be that people experience less anxiety during sex, when the sex is with a committed romantic partner. Future research may wish to examine within a sample of people who all report issues with sexual anxiety whether body and appearance satisfaction predicts the level of sexual anxiety. Indeed, past research suggests that one reason for feeling anxious during sex may be body self-consciousness and an anxious attentional focus on the body.19,20,21,62

Distress Related to Sexual Problems

Results also suggested that appearance satisfaction was unrelated to overall sexual problem-related distress (RQ1) and distress related to sexual lack of interest and enjoyment, and feeling anxious during sex (RQ2). Appearance satisfaction was related to feeling less distress about sexual lack of excitement and climax (RQ2). It may be that the link between appearance dissatisfaction, cognitive distractions, and sexual problems and related distress provides an explanation. Previous research has found that body dissatisfaction is associated with cognitive distractions63 and that body dissatisfaction is associated with distress related to sexual problems. In fact, Pascoal and colleagues64 found that the association between body dissatisfaction and sexual functioning was mediated by cognitive distractions. In contrast to this study64, Pascoal et al. measured overall distress for all/any sexual problems. It could be that lower levels of appearance satisfaction lead to higher levels of cognitive distraction and these are more influential during the arousal and orgasm phases of the sexual response cycle and consequently be associated with higher levels of distress associated with lack of excitement and climax. Future research should examine whether there is a differential effect of body satisfaction and cognitive distractions on the diverse sexual problems and their associated distress. Although these associations are small in magnitude, they represent a first examination of the associations between appearance satisfaction and distress over specific sexual problems. Past research has found that lower appearance dissatisfaction was associated with less sexual problem-related distress;39,64 this research, however, examined general distress and not problem-specific distress.

The Role of Relationship Satisfaction

It is noteworthy that as people reported higher relationship satisfaction, they were less likely to endorse having a sexual problem, but felt more distress over lack of excitement. This is consistent with past research, which has found that relationship satisfaction is associated with better sexual functioning.25,40, 41, 42, 43 However, in committed relationships, people may feel that sexual interactions are normative, and thus, they may feel more distressed about lack of excitement for a partner for whom they otherwise care and love. Future research should seek to examine the role of perceptions of sexual norms and expectations in romantic relationships, and their importance in predicting distress associated with sexual problems, particularly problems related to arousal.

Relationship satisfaction was unrelated to the presence of all five specific sexual problems, and unrelated to overall distress and distress related to all other problems (except for distress over lack of excitement). This is inconsistent with past research, which has found that lower relationship satisfaction was associated with greater distress48,65 and greater emotional closeness during sex was associated with less distress35,45, 46, 47. However, one reason for this lack of associations may be the relatively high levels of relationship satisfaction in the sample. Indeed, the average level of relationship satisfaction was 5.91 out of 7 (see Table 1); thus, there may be have been a ceiling effect that restricted the range in scores, leading to reduced variability. Consequently, we did not find indications of moderation by relationship satisfaction (RQ3a and RQ3b).

The Role of Gender

Much extant research in both sexuality and appearance satisfaction has focused on gender, often examining these construct separately for men and women. Indeed, sexual problems may vary by sex (i.e., men may have issues with erection and ejaculation, while women may have issues with vaginal lubrication and pain during intercourse). Similarly, appearance ideals may vary by gender, as women may strive for thinness and men may strive for muscularity.66 However, it is recognized that, while ideals may vary, both genders experience dissatisfaction with their appearance,2 though research suggests that women experience higher levels of dissatisfaction than do men. One might therefore expect that the association between appearance satisfaction and sexual problems, and associated distress, may be stronger for women, as they may internalize the importance that society places on ideal women's body shapes and appearances.67 However, in the current study, we found that the association did not vary by gender. That is, the associations between appearance satisfaction and the presence of sexual problems, and their associated distress, were not stronger for women than for men, as one might expect. However, we did find general gender differences, such that women were more likely to report sexual problems (though, not consistently higher distress than men). These findings suggest that when appearance satisfaction and sexual problems are assessed in general, men's and women's experiences are similar. Especially considering that recent theory and research suggests that men and women are more similar than they are different across most psychological variables,68,69 this may be relevant in the context to experiences with sexual problems and appearance satisfaction. However, it may be that this pattern of results would be different, if sexual problems and appearance evaluations were assessed in gender-specific ways.

Limitations and Future Directions

There are strengths to the current study, including a large sample of partnered adults and assessment of specific sexual problems along with associated distress. However, the current study should also be viewed in terms of its limitations.

For one, while it is a benefit that we were able to examine individual and specific sexual problems, they were assessed using single items, and not an established scale. This may be a limitation, as sexual problems were addressed generally and not with respect to gender-specific problems, such as problems with erection, ejaculation, vaginal lubrication, or pain during sex. Moreover, single-item measures of sexual satisfaction have the disadvantage of being unidimensional and may have low test-retest reliability.70 Relatedly, appearance satisfaction was assessed using a single item that asked about satisfaction with physical appearance (“fysisk utseende”), and did not use existing scales of body or appearance dissatisfaction71. However, single items (rather than scales) were employed in an effort to maximize response rates and reduce participant burden, and is generally accepted and widely used in the field, as they may capture the construct to a satisfactory degree.72 Moreover, the generality of the items allowed us to assess sexual problems and feelings about appearance that may be relevant to all, regardless of gender.

Moreover, due to the general population sample and concerns about participant burden in responding to survey questions, we did not collect any data regarding any general health concerns, medications (specifically those with possible sexual side effects or appearance-related side effects such as weight gain), sexual pathologies or related therapies. Future research should consider collecting such data, as these can interfere with sexual activity or with body image. Similarly, future research may wish to include extended (and validated) measurement of gender-specific sexual problems, as well as gender-specific appearance evaluations, as such measurements may provide useful information regarding the link between body appearance and sexuality. Some research suggests that evaluation regarding specific body parts may be uniquely associated with sexual functioning73. Future research may also wish to examine potential mediators of the association between appearance satisfaction and sexual functioning. One such mediator may be inhibition/excitation. It has been demonstrated that, in women, self-perceived sexual attractiveness influence sexual responses by acting on the excitation and inhibition response pathways.74

Norwegian Sexual Behavior surveys have been conducted in previous years, yielding responses of 23% in 2008, 34% in 2002, 38% in 1997, 48% in 1992, and 63% in 198775. Thus, a low response rate seems to be a common finding in Norwegian questionnaire surveys. However, the response rate in this survey was higher than that in the 2008 survey. It has been demonstrated that dropout from the survey was unrelated to sexual behaviour, and random rather than systematic.76 As this study had a similar response rate to previous iterations of the survey, there is reason to believe that dropout in this survey also was random rather than systematic.

The data is cross-sectional in nature and therefore, we are precluded from making conclusions about causality. Future research may wish to examine these associations using more naturalistic methods, such as event-contingent diary methods or ecological momentary assessments. Such methods are relatively rare in sex research, though much knowledge is to be gained. That is, such methods allow for an examination of associations between constructs as they occurred in daily life, reducing retrospective bias. Currently, much work focus on general reports of sexual functions and memory of feelings of distress, which may be skewed by recency effects.77 Moreover, as sexual interactions and sexual functioning may be impacted by mood, and many daily and relational events may influence mood, future daily diary research may wish to include a measure of mood, to examine its predictive association with daily sexual functioning and associated distress. Indeed, it may be that mood serves as a mediator of the association between daily relational events and daily sexual functioning and associated distress.

Lastly, consistent with past research,43,78 the current research examined relationship satisfaction as a predictor of sexual problems or sexual functioning. However, it may be that relationship satisfaction may serve as the outcome, such that sexual functioning predicts relationship satisfaction. Likely, there is a bidirectional association between the two, and future research should seek to disentangle the mechanisms underlying this association. Indeed, it may be that the association between appearance satisfaction and relationship satisfaction is moderated by sexual problems, rather than the reverse, as we examined here. Relatedly, situating sexual problems and associated distress in a relational context, it may be interesting to examine the appearance satisfaction and BMI of both partners in a couple. Much research in the relationship sciences has demonstrated the presence of contagion effects79, and such a dynamic may be at play with appearance satisfaction, relationship satisfaction, and sexual problems/distress as well. That is, it may be that individuals who are dissatisfied with their appearance foster appearance dissatisfaction in their partners, and that jointly, this dissatisfaction influence their sexual behavior in negative ways.

Children and adolescents are gradually discovering the dangers hiding behind social interactions & need to come equipped to detect them, assess them, etc.; failures in these abilities are closely related to underdeveloped logical abilities

Steps of Reasoning in Children and Adolescents. Isabelle Brocas and Juan D. Carrillo. Journal of Political Economy, Volume 129, Number 7. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/714118

Abstract: We develop a novel graphical paradigm of a strict-dominance-solvable game to study the developmental trajectory of steps of reasoning between 8 years old and adulthood. Most participants play the equilibrium action either always or only when they have a dominant strategy. Although age is a determinant of equilibrium choice, some very young participants display an innate ability to play at equilibrium. Finally, the proportion of equilibrium play increases significantly until fifth grade and stabilizes afterward, suggesting that the contribution of age to equilibrium play vanishes early in life.

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Adolescents are particularly exposed to situations in which strategic sophistication is crucial to avoid wrong decisions. Examples include engaging in risky activities, such as accepting drugs from peers or engaging in unprotected sex. Also, with the development of the internet, naive users are often preyed upon, asked to provide personal information, or tricked into making harmful decisions. Information deliberately intended to deceive young minds also circulates through social media. Making correct decisions in such environments requires understanding the intentions of others and anticipating the consequences of following their advice or opinions. More generally, children and adolescents are gradually discovering the dangers hiding behind social interactions and need to come equipped to detect them, assess them, and navigate around them. We conjecture that failures in these abilities are closely related to underdeveloped logical abilities, and we predict that the level of sophistication of an individual detected through a simple task matches their behavior in social settings.

Claim: Like a perpetual motion machine, a time crystal forever cycles between states without consuming energy, evading increasing disorder

Observation of Time-Crystalline Eigenstate Order on a Quantum Processor. Xiao Mi, Matteo Ippoliti, Chris Quintana, Amy Greene, Zijun Chen, Jonathan Gross, Frank Arute, Kunal Arya, Juan Atalaya, Ryan Babbush, Joseph C. Bardin, Joao Basso, Andreas Bengtsson, Alexander Bilmes, Alexandre Bourassa, Leon Brill, Michael Broughton, Bob B. Buckley, David A. Buell, Brian Burkett, Nicholas Bushnell, Benjamin Chiaro, Roberto Collins, William Courtney, Dripto Debroy, Sean Demura, Alan R. Derk, Andrew Dunsworth, Daniel Eppens, Catherine Erickson, Edward Farhi, Austin G. Fowler, Brooks Foxen, Craig Gidney, Marissa Giustina, Matthew P. Harrigan, Sean D. Harrington, Jeremy Hilton, Alan Ho, Sabrina Hong, Trent Huang, Ashley Huff, William J. Huggins, L. B. Ioffe, Sergei V. Isakov, Justin Iveland, Evan Jeffrey, Zhang Jiang, Cody Jones, Dvir Kafri, Tanuj Khattar, Seon Kim, Alexei Kitaev, Paul V. Klimov, Alexander N. Korotkov, Fedor Kostritsa, David Landhuis, Pavel Laptev, Joonho Lee, Kenny Lee, Aditya Locharla, Erik Lucero, Orion Martin, Jarrod R. McClean, Trevor McCourt, Matt McEwen, Kevin C. Miao, Masoud Mohseni, Shirin Montazeri, Wojciech Mruczkiewicz, Ofer Naaman, Matthew Neeley, Charles Neill, Michael Newman, Murphy Yuezhen Niu, Thomas E. O'Brien, Alex Opremcak, Eric Ostby, Balint Pato, Andre Petukhov, Nicholas C. Rubin, Daniel Sank, Kevin J. Satzinger, Vladimir Shvarts, Yuan Su, Doug Strain, Marco Szalay, Matthew D. Trevithick, Benjamin Villalonga, Theodore White, Z. Jamie Yao, Ping Yeh, Juhwan Yoo, Adam Zalcman, Hartmut Neven, Sergio Boixo, Vadim Smelyanskiy, Anthony Megrant, Julian Kelly, Yu Chen et al. (5 additional authors not shown). arXiv Jul 28 2021. https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.13571

Abstract: Quantum many-body systems display rich phase structure in their low-temperature equilibrium states. However, much of nature is not in thermal equilibrium. Remarkably, it was recently predicted that out-of-equilibrium systems can exhibit novel dynamical phases that may otherwise be forbidden by equilibrium thermodynamics, a paradigmatic example being the discrete time crystal (DTC). Concretely, dynamical phases can be defined in periodically driven many-body localized systems via the concept of eigenstate order. In eigenstate-ordered phases, the entire many-body spectrum exhibits quantum correlations and long-range order, with characteristic signatures in late-time dynamics from all initial states. It is, however, challenging to experimentally distinguish such stable phases from transient phenomena, wherein few select states can mask typical behavior. Here we implement a continuous family of tunable CPHASE gates on an array of superconducting qubits to experimentally observe an eigenstate-ordered DTC. We demonstrate the characteristic spatiotemporal response of a DTC for generic initial states. Our work employs a time-reversal protocol that discriminates external decoherence from intrinsic thermalization, and leverages quantum typicality to circumvent the exponential cost of densely sampling the eigenspectrum. In addition, we locate the phase transition out of the DTC with an experimental finite-size analysis. These results establish a scalable approach to study non-equilibrium phases of matter on current quantum processors.

Check also World's first video recording of a space-time crystal | Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (mpg.de)

Popular version: Eternal Change for No Energy: A Time Crystal Finally Made Real. Jul 30 2021. https://www.quantamagazine.org/first-time-crystal-built-using-googles-quantum-computer-20210730/

Like a perpetual motion machine, a time crystal forever cycles between states without consuming energy. Physicists claim to have built this new phase of matter inside a quantum computer.

[Full text, photos, etc.,  at the Quanta link above]

In a preprint posted online Thursday night [Observation of Time-Crystalline Eigenstate Order on a Quantum Processor (arxiv.org)], researchers at Google in collaboration with physicists at Stanford, Princeton and other universities say that they have used Google’s quantum computer to demonstrate a genuine “time crystal.” In addition, a separate research group claimed earlier this month to have created a time crystal in a diamond.

A novel phase of matter that physicists have strived to realize for many years, a time crystal is an object whose parts move in a regular, repeating cycle, sustaining this constant change without burning any energy.

“The consequence is amazing: You evade the second law of thermodynamics,” said Roderich Moessner, director of the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden, Germany, and a co-author on the Google paper. That’s the law that says disorder always increases. [!!!]  

Time crystals are also the first objects to spontaneously break “time-translation symmetry,” the usual rule that a stable object will remain the same throughout time. A time crystal is both stable and ever-changing, with special moments that come at periodic intervals in time.

The time crystal is a new category of phases of matter, expanding the definition of what a phase is. All other known phases, like water or ice, are in thermal equilibrium: Their constituent atoms have settled into the state with the lowest energy permitted by the ambient temperature, and their properties don’t change with time. The time crystal is the first “out-of-equilibrium” phase: It has order and perfect stability despite being in an excited and evolving state.

“This is just this completely new and exciting space that we’re working in now,” said Vedika Khemani, a condensed matter physicist now at Stanford who co-discovered the novel phase while she was a graduate student and co-authored the new paper with the Google team.

Khemani, Moessner, Shivaji Sondhi of Princeton and Achilleas Lazarides of Loughborough University in the United Kingdom discovered the possibility of the phase and described its key properties in 2015; a rival group of physicists led by Chetan Nayak of Microsoft Station Q and the University of California, Santa Barbara identified it as a time crystal soon after.

Researchers have raced to create a time crystal over the past five years, but previous demos, though successful on their own terms, have failed to satisfy all the criteria needed to establish the time crystal’s existence. “There are good reasons to think that none of those experiments completely succeeded, and a quantum computer like [Google’s] would be particularly well placed to do much better than those earlier experiments,” said John Chalker, a condensed matter physicist at the University of Oxford who wasn’t involved in the new work.

Google’s quantum computing team made headlines in 2019 when they performed the first-ever computation that ordinary computers weren’t thought to be able to do in a practical amount of time. Yet that task was contrived to show a speedup and was of no inherent interest. The new time crystal demo marks one of the first times a quantum computer has found gainful employment.

“It’s a fantastic use of [Google’s] processor,” Nayak said.

With yesterday’s preprint, which has been submitted for publication, and other recent results, researchers have fulfilled the original hope for quantum computers. In his 1982 paper proposing the devices, the physicist Richard Feynman argued that they could be used to simulate the particles of any imaginable quantum system.

A time crystal exemplifies that vision. It’s a quantum object that nature itself probably never creates, given its complex combination of delicate ingredients. Imaginations conjured the recipe, stirred by nature’s most baffling laws.

An Impossible Idea, Resurrected

The original notion of a time crystal had a fatal flaw.

The Nobel Prize­-winning physicist Frank Wilczek conceived the idea in 2012, while teaching a class about ordinary (spatial) crystals. “If you think about crystals in space, it’s very natural also to think about the classification of crystalline behavior in time,” he told this magazine not long after.

Consider a diamond, a crystalline phase of a clump of carbon atoms. The clump is governed by the same equations everywhere in space, yet it takes a form that has periodic spatial variations, with atoms positioned at lattice points. Physicists say that it “spontaneously breaks space-translation symmetry.” Only minimum-energy equilibrium states spontaneously break spatial symmetries in this way.

Wilczek envisioned a multi-part object in equilibrium, much like a diamond. But this object breaks time-translation symmetry: It undergoes periodic motion, returning to its initial configuration at regular intervals.

Wilczek’s proposed time crystal was profoundly different from, say, a wall clock — an object that also undergoes periodic motion. Clock hands burn energy and stop when the battery runs out. A Wilczekian time crystal requires no input and continues indefinitely, since the system is in its ultra-stable equilibrium state.

If it sounds implausible, it is: After much thrill and controversy, a 2014 proof showed that Wilczek’s prescription fails, like all other perpetual-motion machines conceived throughout history.

That year, researchers at Princeton were thinking about something else. Khemani and her doctoral adviser, Sondhi, were studying many-body localization, an extension of Anderson localization, the Nobel Prize-winning 1958 discovery that an electron can get stuck in place, as if in a crevice in a rugged landscape.

An electron is best pictured as a wave, whose height [!!!] in different places gives the probability of detecting the particle there. The wave naturally spreads out over time. But Philip Anderson discovered that randomness — such as the presence of random defects in a crystal lattice — can cause the electron’s wave to break up, destructively interfere with itself, and cancel out everywhere except in a small region. The particle localizes.

People thought for decades that interactions between multiple particles would destroy the interference effect. But in 2005, three physicists at Princeton and Columbia universities showed that a one-dimensional chain of quantum particles can experience many-body localization; that is, they all get stuck in a fixed state. This phenomenon would become the first ingredient of the time crystal.

Imagine a row of particles, each with a magnetic orientation (or “spin”) that points up, down, or some probability of both directions. Imagine that the first four spins initially point up, down, down and up. The spins will quantum mechanically fluctuate and quickly align, if they can. But random interference between them can cause the row of particles to get stuck in their particular configuration, unable to rearrange or settle into thermal equilibrium. They’ll point up, down, down and up indefinitely.

Sondhi and a collaborator had discovered that many-body localized systems can exhibit a special kind of order, which would become the second key ingredient of a time crystal: If you flip all the spins in the system (yielding down, up, up and down in our example), you get another stable, many-body localized state.

[infographic]

In the fall of 2014, Khemani joined Sondhi on sabbatical at the Max Planck Institute in Dresden. There, Moessner and Lazarides specialized in so-called Floquet systems: periodically driven systems, such as a crystal that’s being stimulated with a laser of a certain frequency. The laser’s intensity, and thus the strength of its effect on the system, periodically varies.

Moessner, Lazarides, Sondhi and Khemani studied what happens when a many-body localized system is periodically driven in this way. They found in calculations and simulations that when you tickle a localized chain of spins with a laser in a particular way, they’ll flip back and forth, moving between two different many-body localized states in a repeating cycle forever without absorbing any net energy from the laser.

They called their discovery a pi spin-glass phase (where the angle pi signifies a 180-degree flip). The group reported the concept of this new phase of matter — the first many-body, out-of-equilibrium phase ever identified — in a 2015 preprint, but the words “time crystal” didn’t appear anywhere in it. The authors added the term in an updated version, published in Physical Review Letters in June 2016, thanking a reviewer in the acknowledgments for making the connection between their pi spin-glass phase and time crystals.

Something else happened between the preprint’s appearance and its publication: Nayak, who is a former graduate student of Wilczek’s, and collaborators Dominic Else and Bela Bauer put out a preprint in March 2016 proposing the existence of objects called Floquet time crystals. They pointed to Khemani and company’s pi spin-glass phase as an example.

A Floquet time crystal exhibits the kind of behavior envisioned by Wilczek, but only while being periodically driven by an external energy source. This kind of time crystal circumvents the failure of Wilczek’s original idea by never professing to be in thermal equilibrium. Because it’s a many-body localized system, its spins or other parts are unable to settle into equilibrium; they’re stuck where they are. But the system doesn’t heat up either, despite being pumped by a laser or other driver. Instead, it cycles back and forth indefinitely between localized states.

Already, the laser will have broken the symmetry between all moments in time for the row of spins, imposing instead “discrete time-translation symmetry” — that is, identical conditions only after each periodic cycle of the laser. But then, through its back-and-forth flips, the row of spins further breaks the discrete time-translation symmetry imposed by the laser, since its own periodic cycles are multiples of the laser’s.

Khemani and co-authors had characterized this phase in detail, but Nayak’s group couched it in the language of time, symmetry and spontaneous symmetry-breaking — all fundamental concepts in physics. As well as offering sexier terminology, they provided new facets of understanding, and they slightly generalized the notion of a Floquet time crystal beyond the pi spin-glass phase (noting that a certain symmetry it has isn’t needed). Their paper was published in Physical Review Letters in August 2016, two months after Khemani and company published the theoretical discovery of the first example of the phase.

Both groups claim to have discovered the idea. Since then, the rival researchers and others have raced to create a time crystal in reality.

The Perfect Platform

Nayak’s crew teamed up with Chris Monroe at the University of Maryland, who uses electromagnetic fields to trap and control ions. Last month, the group reported in Science that they’d turned the trapped ions into an approximate, or “prethermal,” time crystal. Its cyclical variations (in this case, ions jumping between two states) are practically indistinguishable from those of a genuine time crystal. But unlike a diamond, this prethermal time crystal is not forever; if the experiment ran for long enough, the system would gradually equilibrate and the cyclical behavior would break down.

Khemani, Sondhi, Moessner and collaborators hitched their wagon elsewhere. In 2019, Google announced that its Sycamore quantum computer had completed a task in 200 seconds that would take a conventional computer 10,000 years. (Other researchers would later describe a way to greatly speed up the ordinary computer’s calculation.) In reading the announcement paper, Moessner said, he and his colleagues realized that “the Sycamore processor contains as its fundamental building blocks exactly the things we need to realize the Floquet time crystal.”

Serendipitously, Sycamore’s developers were also looking for something to do with their machine, which is too error-prone to run the cryptography and search algorithms designed for full-fledged quantum computers. When Khemani and colleagues reached out to Kostya Kechedzhi, a theorist at Google, he and his team quickly agreed to collaborate on the time crystal project. “My work, not only with discrete time crystals but other projects, is to try and use our processor as a scientific tool to study new physics or chemistry,” Kechedzhi said.

Quantum computers consist of “qubits” — essentially controllable quantum particles, each of which can maintain two possible states, labeled 0 and 1, at the same time. When qubits interact, they can collectively juggle an exponential number of simultaneous possibilities, enabling computing advantages.

Google’s qubits consist of superconducting aluminum strips. Each has two possible energy states, which can be programmed to represent spins pointing up or down. For the demo, Kechedzhi and collaborators used a chip with 20 qubits to serve as the time crystal.

Perhaps the main advantage of the machine over its competitors is its ability to tune the strengths of interactions between its qubits. This tunability is key to why the system could become a time crystal: The programmers could randomize the qubits’ interaction strengths, and this randomness created destructive interference between them that allowed the row of spins to achieve many-body localization. The qubits could lock into a set pattern of orientations rather than aligning.

The researchers gave the spins arbitrary initial configurations, such as: up, down, down, up, and so on. Pumping the system with microwaves flipped up-pointing spins to down and vice versa. By running tens of thousands of demos for each initial configuration and measuring the states of the qubits after different amounts of time in each run, the researchers could observe that the system of spins was flipping back and forth between two many-body localized states.

The hallmark of a phase is extreme stability. Ice stays as ice even if the temperature fluctuates. Indeed, the researchers found that microwave pulses only had to flip spins somewhere in the ballpark of 180 degrees, but not exactly that much, for the spins to return to their exact initial orientation after two pulses, like little boats righting themselves. Furthermore, the spins never absorbed or dissipated net energy from the microwave laser, leaving the disorder of the system unchanged.

On July 5, a team based at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands reported that they built a Floquet time crystal not in a quantum processor, but out of the nuclear spins of carbon atoms in a diamond. The Delft system is smaller and more limited than the time crystal realized in Google’s quantum processor.

It’s unclear whether a Floquet time crystal might have practical use. But its stability seems promising to Moessner. “Something that’s as stable as this is unusual, and special things become useful,” he said.

Or the state might be merely conceptually useful. It’s the first and simplest example of an out-of-equilibrium phase, but the researchers suspect that more such phases are physically possible.

Nayak argues that time crystals illuminate something profound about the nature of time. Normally in physics, he said, “however much you try to treat [time] as being just another dimension, it is always kind of an outlier.” Einstein made the best attempt at unification, weaving 3D space together with time into a four-dimensional fabric: space-time. But even in his theory, unidirectional time is unique. With time crystals, Nayak said, “this is the first case that I know of where all of a sudden time is just one of the gang.”

Chalker argues, though, that time remains an outlier. Wilczek’s time crystal would have been a true unification of time and space, he said. Spatial crystals are in equilibrium, and relatedly, they break continuous space-translation symmetry. The discovery that, in the case of time, only discrete time-translation symmetry may be broken by time crystals puts a new angle on the distinction between time and space.

These discussions will continue, driven by the possibility of exploration on quantum computers. Condensed matter physicists used to concern themselves with the phases of the natural world. “The focus moved from studying what nature gives us,” Chalker said, to dreaming up exotic forms of matter that quantum mechanics allows.

Update: July 30, 2021

Following the publication of this article, Quanta learned that a separate research group had, on July 5, posted a preprint claiming to have created a time crystal using nine carbon atoms in a diamond. We have updated the article to include this result.

From 2018... The Polarizing Consequences of Ideological Identities: When we are discussing ideology—a presumably issue-based concept—we are not entirely discussing issues, but our social attachments to ideological labels

From 2018... Ideologues without Issues: The Polarizing Consequences of Ideological Identities. Lilliana Mason. Public Opinion Quarterly, Volume 82, Issue S1, 2018, Pages 866–887, Mar 21 2018. https://doi.org/10.1093/poq/nfy005. A correction has been published: Public Opinion Quarterly, Volume 82, Issue 4, Winter 2018, Page 793, https://doi.org/10.1093/poq/nfz005 (published mangled the page numbers)

Abstract: The distinction between a person’s ideological identity and their issue positions has come more clearly into focus in recent research. Scholars have pointed out a significant difference between identity-based and issue-based ideology in the American electorate. However, the affective and social effects of these separate elements of ideology have not been sufficiently explored. Drawing on a national sample collected by SSI and data from the 2016 ANES, this article finds that the identity-based elements of ideology are capable of driving heightened levels of affective polarization against outgroup ideologues, even at low levels of policy attitude extremity or constraint. These findings demonstrate how Americans can use ideological terms to disparage political opponents without necessarily holding constrained sets of policy attitudes.

Conclusion

In the context of the 2016 election, many pundits have expressed confusion over the appeal of a candidate whose policy plans seemed, at best, ideologically conflicted. How could self-identified “conservatives” find appeal in a candidate who did not hold consistently right-leaning policy positions? The data presented here show that, in fact, this should be easy to explain. The power behind the labels “liberal” and “conservative” to predict strong preferences for the ideological ingroup is based largely in the social identification with those groups, not in the organization of attitudes associated with the labels.

That is, even when we are discussing ideology—a presumably issue-based concept—we are not entirely discussing issues. And when we wish to know how “ideological” our increasing affective polarization truly is, the answer is that the ideological roots of that polarization are largely based in our social attachments to ideological labels, not only to thoughtful collections of opinions.

There is a difference between ideological labels and ideological issue positions. Identity-based ideology encompasses more than just a list of policy attitudes. As a result of this, there is a distinct difference in the effects of the two elements of ideology. Identity-based ideology can drive affective ideological polarization even when individuals are naïve about policy. The passion and prejudice with which we approach politics is driven not only by what we think, but also powerfully by who we think we are.

Incarceration has meaningful reoffending-reducing average effects that diminish in incarceration length; as a result, budget-neutral reductions in sentence length combined with increases in incarceration rates can decrease recidivism

How Does Incarceration Affect Reoffending? Estimating the Dose-Response Function. Evan K. Rose and Yotam Shem-Tov. Journal of Political Economy, Jul 2021. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/716561

Abstract: We study the causal effect of incarceration on reoffending using discontinuities in North Carolina’s sentencing guidelines. A regression discontinuity analysis shows that one year of incarceration causes a reduction in the likelihood of being reincarcerated within three, five, and eight years from sentencing by 44%, 29%, and 21%. To parse the potentially heterogeneous dose-response relationship underlying these effects, we develop an econometric model of prison sentences and recidivism. We find that incarceration has meaningful reoffending-reducing average effects that diminish in incarceration length. As a result, budget-neutral reductions in sentence length combined with increases in incarceration rates can decrease recidivism.

6 Concluding remarks

Our analysis shows that incarceration substantially reduces reoffending in the years after sentencing. The effects are not concentrated among a specific type of criminal incident: we observe reductions in violent, property, and drug crimes, as well as reincarceration overall. We then use a Roy-style selection model to parse the heterogeneous dose-response underlying these effects. We find that the average treatment effects of incarceration are diminishing in sentence length. In addition, we find that while the offenders given longest sentences have the highest recidivism risk, they also experience the largest reductions in reoffending due to exposure to prison. Budget neutral changes in sentencing that take advantage of these patterns by shortening sentences overall but sending a larger fraction of offenders to prison can generate meaningful reductions in recidivism. This exercise, however, speaks only to better allocations of sentences given current levels incarceration spending; it does not imply that all offenders should be incarcerated for at least a brief period. Indeed, a broader cost-benefit analysis may find it is optimal to reduce incarceration overall. Our estimates are an important contribution to the on-going debate over U.S. criminal justice policy. After growing steadily since the 1970s, incarceration rates began to decline slightly in the mid-2000s. Recent policy changes, however, have the potential to at least check these recent reductions. While our estimates show that incarceration sentences do not increase reoffending, they also demonstrate that incarceration has room to rehabilitate inmates further, especially when compared to carceral regimes in other developed countries such as Norway. Since incarceration is unlikely to be abolished in the near future, understanding what features of imprisonment itself can be rehabilitative or damaging to offenders is a useful area for future research

Why Women Choose Divorce: An Evolutionary Perspective

Why Women Choose Divorce: An Evolutionary Perspective. Gillian Parker et al. Current Opinion in Psychology, July 31 2021. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2021.07.020

Abstract: In Western dual-educated, male-female marriages, women who divorce face greater burdens due to decreased income and primary or sole responsibility for caring for children than do men who divorce. Why, then, do these women initiate divorce more and fare better psychologically after divorce than men? Here, we articulate an evolutionary mismatch perspective, informed by key findings in relationship science. We argue that mismatches between women’s evolved preferences and configurations of modern marriage often clash, producing dissatisfaction. Women’s unprecedented career ascendance also affords women ever more freedom to leave. We discuss pressures from social expectations for men and women that contribute to or compound these vulnerabilities. We conclude with key questions for future research, which can contribute to strategies for mitigating relationship dissatisfaction and the profound loss and pain that results from divorce.

Keywords: divorceevolutionary mismatchesgender rolesunpaid labormate preferences

1.4. Working toward solutions

In sum, a loss of interdependence, along with evolved-preference mismatches, pose threats to modern marriage. Before solutions, we need research to address gaps in the literature. We suggest that answering questions in four key areas will help.

1.4.1. Undoing gendered norms

First, conflicts over unpaid labor stem in part from gendered norms that differ by sex – for example, that women are caregivers and men are breadwinners. Can associations between type of labor and masculinity and femininity be lessened? Messaging campaigns that reframe these activities could help to increase women’s and men’s comfort with counter-normative work and satisfaction in counter-normative marriages.

1.4.2. Childcare assistance

Second, if gendered associations with paid and unpaid labor prove difficult to undo, might assistance with childcare be a better or more immediate solution? Research should address whether this solution challenges gender norms less and the extent to which reduces the burden on mothers, potentially producing greater satisfaction in marriages in which women major or primary breadwinners. Assistance could be hired, provided by employers, or provided by the government, which is growing in political popularity56. In some instances, help could also come from extended kin, particularly grandparents, who have a vested interest in the happiness of their children and the success of their grandchildren. Without assistance many women will continue to feel pressured to do double-duty or attempt to have their male partners help – but with tasks that men do not prefer, potentially damaging the satisfaction of both partners.

1.4.3. Agreements about specializations and interdependence

Third, households, like organizations, could run more efficiently when each person specializes in, rather than shares, a type of labor57. With specialization can come greater interdependence between partners – each needs the other for the family to succeed. Research should address whether couples can be more explicit about division of labor and whether this enhances interdependence, producing positive relationship maintenance processes.

1.4.4. Meta-knowledge about mismatches

Last, can knowledge of evolved psychology allow partners to recognize that pangs of dissatisfaction are “ancestral relics” and reframe them in ways that are less harmful to relationships? This is a question whose answer might have broad relevance to other evolutionary mismatches, including those that can occur in the realm of romantic relationships (e.g., casual sex58) and well-known mismatches between evolved preferences for foods high levels of sugar, fat, and salt and preserving good health. We see this as a particularly intriguing question and a priority.

A fast-growing body of evidence suggests that people have difficulties in envisioning how their future selves will look like and behave; so, what determines that one’s future self feels like a dissimilar stranger or exactly the same person?

Stranger or a Clone? Future Self Connectedness Depends on Who You Ask, When You Ask, and What Dimension You Focus On. Eirini Kapogli, Jordi Quoidbach. Current Opinion in Psychology, July 31 2021. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2021.07.023

Abstract: A fast-growing body of evidence suggests that people have difficulties in envisioning how their future selves will look like and behave. So, what determines that one’s future self feels like a dissimilar stranger or exactly the same person? Here we review relevant work and propose a three-factor framework in an effort to organize and highlight important findings. Our review suggests that who we are, what dimension we focus on, as well as the cognitive and affective states we are in, impact the way we envision our future self being similar or different from our current self. We conclude with remaining questions that are yet to be explored.

Keywords: future selfperceived similarityperceived dissimilarityself-continuityconnectedness

Partner's traits which motivate people to stay in an intimate relationship: The “Faithful and trustworthy” & the “Does well with my friends and family” factors, were associated with more years in a relationship

Partner's traits which motivate people to stay in an intimate relationship: An explorative analysis. Menelaos Apostolou, Christoforos Christoforou. Personality and Individual Differences, Volume 183, December 2021, 111155. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2021.111155

Highlights

• Identified 75 partner traits that motivate people to stay in an intimate relationship

• Classified the 75 partner traits in 11 broader factors

• Found that the extracted factors were associated with longer relationship length and better relationship prospects

Abstract: Intimate relationships vary in how long they last, and the current study attempted to identify partners' traits which are associated with longer relationship length and better perceived relationship prospects. In particular, Study 1 employed open-ended questionnaires and in-depth interviews in a sample of 207 Greek-speaking participants, and identified 75 partner traits which motivate people to continue an intimate relationship. Using quantitative research methods in a sample of 1189 Greek-speaking participants, Study 2 classified these traits in 11 broader factors. The “Faithful and trustworthy” and the “Does well with my friends and family” factors, were associated with more years in a relationship. Furthermore, the “Faithful and trustworthy,” the “Gives me sexual satisfaction,” the “Committed to me” and the “Fun to be with” factors, had a positive effect on the perceived prospects of the current relationship, which was mediated by relationship satisfaction. In addition, the “Does well with my friends and family,” had a direct positive effect on relationship prospects.

Keywords: Relationship lengthRelationship stabilityRelationship satisfactionMating strategiesMating

Some Revenge Now or More Revenge Later? Applying an Intertemporal Framework to Retaliatory Aggression

West, Samuel J., Emily Lasko, Calvin Hall, Nayaab Khan, and David Chester. 2021. “Some Revenge Now or More Revenge Later? Applying an Intertemporal Framework to Retaliatory Aggression.” PsyArXiv. July 30. doi:10.31234/osf.io/wpfrs

Abstract: Retaliatory aggression is a rewarding behavior. Decisions about rewarding behaviors often involve an intertemporal bias, such that people prefer immediate rewards and discount delayed rewards. We integrated these literatures to test whether the delay discounting framework could be applied to retaliatory aggression. Across six studies (total N = 1,508), participants repeatedly chose between immediate-but-lesser or delayed-but-greater retaliation. As with other rewards (e.g., money), participants preferred immediate-but-lesser retaliation, discounting the value of delayed-but-greater revenge. Rates of aggression discounting were temporally stable and associated with greater aggressive behavior. Experimentally-induced angry rumination reduced discounting rates, motivating participants to wait longer to inflict greater harm. Participants with greater antagonistic traits (e.g., physical sadism), displayed stronger preferences for delayed-but greater vengeance. These findings suggest that some dispositionally aggressive individuals may delay retaliation in service of greater future revenge. Our results bolster the important role of reward in retaliatory aggression and suggest that an intertemporal framework is likely a fruitful area of investigation for antisocial behavior. We discuss the implications of our findings in relation to contemporary theories of aggression and broader theories of antisocial behavior.

None of the constructs of the dark triad are meaningfully related to intelligence; this challenges the notion that the dark triad is an adaptive set of personality traits that enables individuals to effectively manipulate their social surroundings

General Intelligence and the Dark Triad: A Meta-Analysis. Moritz Michels. Journal of Individual Differences, Jul 29 2021. https://doi.org/10.1027/1614-0001/a000352

Abstract: The dark triad of personality (D3) – consisting of psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and narcissism – is a set of socially aversive personality traits. All three traits encompass disagreeable behavior and a particular disregard for the well-being of others, but also a tendency to strategic and deceptive manipulation of social environments in order to attain one′s goals. To exercise these complex manipulations effectively it seems beneficial to have high cognitive abilities. Therefore, a meta-analysis was conducted to examine possible relationships between intelligence and the dark triad. A total of 143 studies were identified to estimate the strength of relationships between the D3 and general, verbal, and nonverbal intelligence. The results indicate that none of the constructs of the dark triad are meaningfully related to intelligence. However, there was a small negative correlation between intelligence and Factor 2 psychopathy. The substantial heterogeneity regarding the observed effect sizes could not be explained with meta-regression for the most part. There was no evidence for a publication bias. In total, the results challenge the notion that the dark triad is an adaptive set of personality traits that enables individuals to effectively manipulate their social surroundings.

Is this analysis realistic?: Male rape happens about as often as female rape, and possibly exceeds it; evidence also shows that 80% of those who rape men are women

 On the Sexual Assault of Men. David DiMarco, John Mizzoni & Ryan Savitz. Sexuality & Culture, Jul 29 2021. https://rd.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12119-021-09901-1

Abstract: Anyone who engages in sexual intercourse with someone who is under the influence of drugs or alcohol, unconscious, oblivious to their surroundings or not able to voice dissent can be charged with the crime of rape. No individual should be used, without their consent, for another person’s pleasure. The lack of informed consent makes rape unethical. Ethically the victim being male should be irrelevant. Yet male rape is rarely reported and frequently minimized, as will be shown by the 2010 CDC National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey as well as other sources in this paper which will show that male rape happens about as often as female rape, and possibly exceeds it. Evidence also shows that 80% of those who rape men are women. Reconsidering stereotypes of the rape of men is an important part of rethinking masculinity. Among these stereotypes is the assumption that male rape is rare, as well as assumptions about the experience of male rape victims. The goal of this paper is to show that male rape is a prevalent problem and that the victims endure the same emotional and psychological after-effects as female rape victims.

The meta-analysis provides evidence that men’s self-perceived mate value positively predicts their tendency to engage in short-term mating, but that the total effect size is small

Men’s Mate Value Correlates with a Less Restricted Sociosexual Orientation: A Meta-Analysis. Steven Arnocky, Jessica Desrochers, Amanda Rotella, Graham Albert, Carolyn Hodges-Simeon, Ashley Locke, Jacob Belanger, Danielle Lynch & Benjamin Kelly. Archives of Sexual Behavior, Jul 29 2021. https://rd.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-021-01937-6

Abstract: Men, relative to women, can benefit their total reproductive success by engaging in short-term pluralistic mating. Yet not all men enact such a mating strategy. It has previously been hypothesized that high mate value men should be most likely to adopt a short-term mating strategy, with this prediction being firmly grounded in some important mid-level evolutionary psychological theories. Yet evidence to support such a link has been mixed. This paper presents a comprehensive meta-analysis of 33 published and unpublished studies (N = 5928) in which we find that that self-reported mate value accounts for roughly 6% of variance in men’s sociosexual orientation. The meta-analysis provides evidence that men’s self-perceived mate value positively predicts their tendency to engage in short-term mating, but that the total effect size is small.

Positive intergroup contact, under some conditions, can undermine the interest of members of both socially disadvantaged and advantaged groups to act for equality

Ambivalent Effects of Positive Contact Between Women and Men on Collective Actions for Women’s Rights. Alexandra Vázquez et al. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, December 3, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167220974162

Abstract: Positive intergroup contact, under some conditions, can undermine the interest of members of both socially disadvantaged and advantaged groups to act for equality. However, little is known about whether similar effects appear in a unique form of intergroup relations, gender relations. In two correlational studies and two experiments, we investigated the relationships among quality of contact, perceived discrimination, fusion with the feminist movement, and willingness to engage in collective action for women’s rights. For women (Study 1a), positive contact with men was associated with less perceived discrimination, less fusion, and less collective action. For men (Study 1b), the relationships were in the opposite direction. Studies 2a and 2b revealed that recalling experiences of gender discrimination nullified the effects of contact for both women and men as compared to a control condition. Thus, when discrimination is not explicitly recognized, positive contact might have sedative effects on women, but mobilizing effects on men.

Keywords: collective action, discrimination, gender inequality, identity fusion, intergroup contact

Why friendships end: The most important factor was selfishness, followed by romantic involvement, the lack of frequent interaction, and the perceptions of friends and family

Apostolou, M., & Keramari, D. (2021). Why friendships end: An evolutionary examination. Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences, Jul 2021. https://doi.org/10.1037/ebs0000269

Abstract: People make friendships, some of which last a lifetime, whereas others are short-lived. Within the context of an evolutionary theoretical framework, this study aims to identify the reasons that lead people to terminate a friendship. More specifically, in Study 1, by using a combination of qualitative research methods in a sample of 133 Greek-speaking participants, we identified 55 such reasons. In Study 2, by using exploratory factor analysis in a sample of 557 Greek-speaking participants, we classified these reasons in four broader factors for terminating a friendship. As indicated by the means, the most important factor was selfishness, followed by romantic involvement, the lack of frequent interaction, and the perceptions of friends and family. Moreover, significant sex and age effects were found for most factors.

Individual selfishness in high-impact decisions affecting a large group is compatible with prosociality in bilateral low-stakes interactions; human beings can simultaneously be generous with others and selfish with large groups

Generous with individuals and selfish to the masses. Carlos Alós-Ferrer, Jaume García-Segarra & Alexander Ritschel. Nature Human Behaviour, July 29 2021. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-021-01170-0

Abstract: The seemingly rampant economic selfishness suggested by many recent corporate scandals is at odds with empirical results from behavioural economics, which demonstrate high levels of prosocial behaviour in bilateral interactions and low levels of dishonest behaviour. We design an experimental setting, the ‘Big Robber’ game, where a ‘robber’ can obtain a large personal gain by appropriating the earnings of a large group of ‘victims’. In a large laboratory experiment (N = 640), more than half of all robbers took as much as possible and almost nobody declined to rob. However, the same participants simultaneously displayed standard, predominantly prosocial behaviour in Dictator, Ultimatum and Trust games. Thus, we provide direct empirical evidence showing that individual selfishness in high-impact decisions affecting a large group is compatible with prosociality in bilateral low-stakes interactions. That is, human beings can simultaneously be generous with others and selfish with large groups.

Are partisans able to accurately describe their opponents’ position, or do they instead generate unrepresentative “straw man” arguments?

The straw man effect: Partisan misrepresentation in natural language. Michael Yeomans. Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, July 20, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1177/13684302211014582

Abstract: Political discourse often seems divided not just by different preferences, but by entirely different representations of the debate. Are partisans able to accurately describe their opponents’ position, or do they instead generate unrepresentative “straw man” arguments? In this research we examined an (incentivized) political imitation game by asking partisans on both sides of the U.S. health care debate to describe the most common arguments for and against ObamaCare. We used natural language-processing algorithms to benchmark the biases and blind spots of our participants. Overall, partisans showed a limited ability to simulate their opponents’ perspective, or to distinguish genuine from imitation arguments. In general, imitations were less extreme than their genuine counterparts. Individual difference analyses suggest that political sophistication only improves the representations of one’s own side but not of an opponent’s side, exacerbating the straw man effect. Our findings suggest that false beliefs about partisan opponents may be pervasive.

Keywords: intergroup perception, natural language processing, perspective-taking, political psychology

General Discussion

The evidence presented here confirms that, in open-ended text, partisans did not represent their opponents’ arguments well. However, in contrast to the colloquial understanding of straw man arguments, our results suggest that this kind of partisan disagreement is often not a deliberate tactic. The straw man effect was robust to incentives for accuracy, implying that partisans were often unable—not just unwilling—to take their opponents’ perspective. Furthermore, our results suggest that partisans are not particularly accurate at detecting imitations of genuine positions either. Instead, we found that machine learning algorithms could detect imitations with substantially higher accuracy than human judges.

Theoretical Implications

While other recent research has shown that incentives can reduce or even extinguish partisan gaps on factual questions (Bullock et al., 2015; Prior et al., 2015), these results showed a small reduction. However, that earlier work relied on questions that asked participants to guess the correct number on a scale (e.g., percentage of GDP growth under Obama). In these cases, the question itself provides the range of possible answers, and it is easy for partisans to deliberately adjust their answer to suit their goals. However, in open-ended tasks, the range of possible responses is very wide, and it is more difficult for partisans to intuit the correct adjustment from the question. To be sure, incentives do not guarantee that the responses were valid measures of partisans’ actual mental representations of their opponents. For example, incentives may induce them to recite familiar stereotypes rather than their true beliefs about their opponents. But these stereotypes might still serve as signal of meta-knowledge about the contours of a debate. Regardless, incentives are necessary to distinguish the mechanism here from the Talisse and Aikin model (2006) of straw men as deliberate distortions for partisan gain. And our results suggest that at least some straw man arguments persist even when partisans have sincere intentions.

Our results also suggest that the straw man effect is exacerbated by political sophistication. Participants with more political knowledge wrote better descriptions of their own position, but that knowledge was of no help when describing their opponents’. The natural language-processing models also suggested that the language of imitators was more similar to that of genuine moderates than to that of genuine extremists, even though previous research has shown that partisans believe that their opponents hold extreme positions. This perhaps is related to why participants were overconfident in their ability to distinguish imitations from genuine arguments.

These results suggest that perceived polarization might be a natural consequence of asymmetric expertise, whereby partisans gather evidence to buttress their own preferred conclusions. Also known as the rationalizing voter theory (Lodge & Taber, 2013), this is supported by mechanisms at many cognitive levels (e.g., Frenda et al., 2012; Kahan, 2015; Lord et al., 1979; Robinson et al., 1995; Toner et al., 2013), and is a compelling explanation for why, in this research, partisans who could so faithfully defend their own position were at a loss when asked to describe their opponents’ point of view. This lack of insight is typical in social judgment (Dunning et al., 2003; Nisbett & Wilson, 1977; Pronin et al., 2002), but it poses particular difficulties for intergroup research because the very processes that divide partisans may also distort their construal of others’ positions.

Limitations and Future Research

In this research, we did not find an intervention to reduce partisan misrepresentation. Study 1 showed that incentives were, at best, a weak moderator of the straw man effect. However, this was a short-term intervention and could not be effective if partisans simply lacked the knowledge base to accurately take their opponents’ perspective. To make an analogy to memory, our incentives could plausibly affect participants’ biases in recall, but it would have been too late to make any impact on their biases during encoding. This suggests some skepticism is warranted for the potential of other short-term interventions (though see Saguy & Kteily, 2011; Stern & Kleiman, 2015). In addition, any potential encoding biases may not be eliminated by self-directed information search, since our results suggested that politically sophisticated partisans were no more accurate than political naives in their imitations (Keltner & Robinson, 1993; Lord et al., 1984; Thompson & Hastie, 1990). We also found essentially no effect of intergroup contact on accuracy for opponents, which agrees with a recent review suggesting that the effects of contact are more varied and context-dependent that is often acknowledged (Paluck et al., 2018). Our analysis of the extremity of partisans’ imitations may even provide a mechanism for a potential backfire effect of intergroup contact (similar to Bail et al., 2018). Specifically, partisans’ imitations tended to be more moderate than the actual positions of their opponents—perhaps if they learned how extreme their opponents’ positions tended to be, this would have other negative consequences for intergroup harmony and understanding.

Another limitation in this research is our focus on a single topic. This focus facilitated a rich language model, but it is important to consider whether the topic of debate might have moderated our results. We focused on a high-stakes political topic that featured a wide range of competing evidence as well as genuine differences in preferences and values, so that many texts could be collected from enthusiastic partisans on both sides. However, some topics face a clearer divide where the preponderance of evidence stands against one side—for example, antivaccination debates, global warming denialism, or other conspiracy theories (Hornsey et al., 2018; Rutjens et al., 2018; Stoknes, 2015). In these cases, it is possible that the straw man effect would be asymmetrical, as beliefs based on false premises may also disproportionately reinforce themselves with false beliefs about the opposing arguments. Additionally, many topics of disagreement engage less partisan vigor, where personal preferences are more respected. In cases where partisans are not trying to win a public debate, people may be more genuinely curious about one another, lessening the effect of the rationalizing voter mechanism. Future work could pack these mechanisms across a range of topics and domains.

The current research also demonstrates how machine learning can be applied to develop psychological theory. Initially, it was difficult to interpret the judges’ low accuracy in Study 1—were partisans bad at being judges, or good at being imitators? The results of Study 2 indicated the former was true, as the language model made it clear that human judges had room for improvement. This result confirmed our central hypothesis that the writers, too, were often failing at their task of recreating their opponents’ perspectives. Similar methods may be useful in other interpersonal judgment tasks—mind perception is hard, and inaccuracy is ubiquitous (Epley & Waytz, 2009). But perspective-taking is often studied in cases where the perspective taker has all the needed information available. In the world outside of the lab, however, social interactions are filled with ambiguity, and the blame for inaccuracy is perhaps better apportioned across both the mind perceiver and the mind perceived. To distinguish the two, researchers must estimate how much information is actually available, and our research demonstrates an empirical framework for that process. The accuracy of social perceptions is an oft-debated topic (e.g., Judd & Park, 1993; Jussim & Zanna, 2005; Zaki & Ochsner, 2011). Our research demonstrates how natural language can be used to study interpersonal accuracy in other domains where data are rich, but misunderstanding is common.

How colonialist attitudes toward native fishes were rooted in elements of racism and sexism; the term “rough fish” is pejorative and degrading to native fish

Goodbye to “Rough Fish”: Paradigm Shift in the Conservation of Native Fishes. Andrew L. Rypel et al. Fisheries, July 21 2021. https://doi.org/10.1002/fsh.10660

Abstract: Perspectives of white males have overwhelmingly dominated fisheries science and management in the USA. This dynamic is exemplified by bias against “rough fish”—a pejorative ascribing low-to-zero value for countless native fishes. One product of this bias is that biologists have ironically worked against conservation of diverse fishes for over a century, and these problems persist today. Nearly all U.S. states retain bag limits and other policies that are regressive and encourage overfishing and decline of native species. Multiple lines of evidence point towards the need for a paradigm shift. These include: (1) native species deliver critical ecosystem services; (2) little demonstration that native fish removals deliver intended benefits; (3) many native fishes are long-lived and vulnerable to overfishing and decline; and (4) fisher values and demographics shifting towards native fish conservation. Overall, existing native fish policies are unacceptable and run counter to the public trust doctrine where government agencies manage natural resources for public use. We encourage agencies to revisit their policies regarding native fishes and provide suggestions for developing more holistic, protective, and inclusive conservation policy.

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Popular version: Cultural Biases Impact Native Fish, Too | UC Davis

From art to religion to land use, much of what is deemed valuable in the United States was shaped centuries ago by the white male perspective. Fish, it turns out, are no exception.

A study published in Fisheries Magazine, a journal of the American Fisheries Society, explores how colonialist attitudes toward native fishes were rooted in elements of racism and sexism. It describes how those attitudes continue to shape fisheries management today, often to the detriment of native fishes.

The study, led by the University of California, Davis, with Nicholls State University and a national team of fisheries researchers, found that nearly all states have policies that encourage overfishing native species. The study maintains that the term “rough fish” is pejorative and degrading to native fish.

“That has bothered me for a long time,” said lead author Andrew Rypel, co-director of the Center for Watershed Sciences and the Peter B. Moyle and California Trout Chair in Coldwater Fish Ecology at UC Davis. He and others have been disturbed by images of “glory killings” of native fish that periodically pop up on the internet, as well as the lump categorization of less preferred species as “rough” or “trash” fish.

“When you trace the history of the problem, you quickly realize it’s because the field was shaped by white men, excluding other points of view,” Rypel said. “Sometimes you have to look at that history honestly to figure out what to do.”

The study offers several recommendations for how anglers and fisheries managers can shift to a new paradigm that’s more inclusive and beneficial to all fish and people.

The Emergence of Cultural Attractors: How Dynamic Populations of Learners Achieve Collective Cognitive Alignment

Falandays, James B., and Paul E. Smaldino. 2021. “The Emergence of Cultural Attractors: How Dynamic Populations of Learners Achieve Collective Cognitive Alignment.” PsyArXiv. July 28. doi:10.31234/osf.io/v5fsr

Abstract: Cultural attractor landscapes describe the time-evolution of cultural variants over successive transmission events. Because these landscapes are statistical patterns that emerge from the interactions of dynamic learners in dynamic populations/environments, stable landscapes cannot be taken for granted. However, they are often modeled as such, and little is known about how attractors form, change, and/or stabilize. We present a model of cultural attractor dynamics, which adapts a model of unsupervised category learning in individuals to a multi-agent setting, wherein learners provide the training input to each other. Agents in our populations spontaneously align their cognitive category structures, producing emergent cultural attractor points. We highlight three interesting behaviors exhibited by our model: (1) noise enhances stability of cultural category structures; (2) short “critical” periods of learning early in life enhance stability; and (3) larger populations produce more stable but less complex attractor landscapes, and cliquish network structure can mitigate the latter.

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All human groups possess group-specific behavioral repertoires involving cultural variants—things such as tools, linguistic behavior, social norms, religious beliefs, and artistic styles. As cultural variants are observed and copied, they are liable to change over time due to the accumulation of errors in transmission. However, even in the absence of strong selection for specific outcomes, cultural variants may nevertheless converge over successive transmission events toward culture-specific “attractor” points (Sperber, 1996). This effect can be attributed to the fact that individuals within a cultural group tend to have similar cognitive biases, such that they tend to perceive, remember, and reproduce information in consistent ways (Heyes, 2018). Without this "cognitive alignment," cultural transmission would be far less reliable, and the potential for cumulative cultural evolution would be limited. But how does cognitive alignment first emerge in dynamic populations? Current models of cultural evolution take cognitive alignment as given. However, this assumption may not always be justified, since many aspects of culture depend on cognitive biases that are themselves socially learned (Heyes, 2018; Karmiloff-Smith, 1994). As each new generation learns through exposure to the cultural products of the previous generation, they may acquire different cognitive biases than their teachers, in turn resulting in a new set of cultural products in the next generation. An unstable feedback loop of this kind could disrupt the accumulation of cultural knowledge in a population, as later generations may no longer perceive, remember, and reproduce information in ways consistent with their ancestors. Furthermore, populations are not static: new individuals are born or enter the population from elsewhere, while others die or leave for new lands. Within such shifting populations, cognitive alignment needs to be actively and continuously maintained in order for cultural knowledge to be successfully preserved across generations. In this paper, we develop an agent-based model of the emergence and maintenance of cognitive alignment in dynamic populations, where individuals act as both teachers and learners to each other, and refine their cognitive biases over the course of interaction. Our initial explorations with this model suggest that achieving and maintaining cognitive alignment may depend upon a finely tuned balance of factors at the levels of cognition, development, and demographic structure. We highlight three interesting and potentially counter-intuitive behaviors exhibited by our model that are not accounted for in other models of cultural evolution: First, we find that some noise is beneficial to stabilizing cognitive alignment. Second, we find that long learning times may destabilize and limit the complexity of cultural repertoires, while critical or sensitive periods of learning enhance stability. Third, we find that larger populations develop less complex, but more stable patterns of alignment, and that this effect can be moderated by network structure. These results suggest that additional complexity may be needed in models of cultural evolution to adequately understand how human-level culture can get off the ground and develop. We conclude by highlighting several ways that our model may be extended to complement 40 existing models of cultural evolution and gene-culture co-evolution.

U.N. climate panel confronts implausibly hot forecasts of future warming

U.N. climate panel confronts implausibly hot forecasts of future warming. Paul Voosen. Science Magazine, Jul. 27, 2021. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/07/un-climate-panel-confronts-implausibly-hot-forecasts-future-warming

[Excerpts. Full text with original sources at the link above]

The motif, the recurrent and dominant platitudes:

Next month, after a yearlong delay because of the pandemic, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will begin to release its first major assessment of human-caused global warming since 2013. The report, the first part of which will appear on 9 August, will drop on a world that has starkly changed in 8 years, warming by more than 0.3°C to nearly 1.3°C above preindustrial levels. Weather has grown more severe, seas are measurably higher, and mountain glaciers and polar ice have shrunk sharply. And after years of limited action, many countries, pushed by a concerned public and corporations, seem willing to curb their carbon emissions.

But:

But as climate scientists face this alarming reality, the climate models that help them project the future have grown a little too alarmist. Many of the world’s leading models are now projecting warming rates that most scientists, including the modelmakers themselves, believe are implausibly fast. In advance of the U.N. report, scientists have scrambled to understand what went wrong and how to turn the models, which in other respects are more powerful and trustworthy than their predecessors, into useful guidance for policymakers. “It’s become clear over the last year or so that we can’t avoid this,” says Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

Ahead of each major IPCC report, the world’s climate modeling centers run a set of scenarios for the future, calculating how different global emissions paths will alter the climate. These raw results, compiled in the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP), then feed directly into the IPCC report. The results live on as other scientists use them to assess the impacts of climate change, insurance companies and financial institutions forecast effects on economies and infrastructure, and economists calculate the true cost of carbon emissions, says Jean-François Lamarque, a lead climate modeler at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and CMIP’s new director. “This is not an ivory tower type of exercise.”

In the past, most models projected a “climate sensitivity”—the warming expected when atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) is doubled over preindustrial times—of between 2°C and 4.5°C. Last year, a landmark paper that largely eschewed models and instead used documented factors including ongoing warming trends calculated a likely climate sensitivity of between 2.6°C and 3.9°C. But many of the new models from leading centers showed warming of more than 5°C—uncomfortably outside these bounds.

The models were also out of step with records of past climate. For example, scientists used the new model from NCAR to simulate the coldest point of the most recent ice age, 20,000 years ago. Extensive paleoclimate records suggest Earth cooled nearly 6°C compared with preindustrial times, but the model, fed with low ice age CO2 levels, had temperatures plummeting by nearly twice that much, suggesting it was far too sensitive to the ups and downs of CO2. “That is clearly outside the range of what the geological data indicate,” says Jessica Tierney, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Arizona and a co-author of the work, which appeared in Geophysical Research Letters. “It’s totally out there.”

To find out why, modelers probed the guts of the simulations, focusing on their representation of clouds, long the wild card of climate change. The models can’t simulate clouds directly, so they rely on known physics and observations to estimate cloud properties and behavior. In previous models ice crystals made up more of the low clouds in the midlatitudes of the southern Pacific Ocean and elsewhere than satellite observations seemed to justify. Ice crystals reflect less sunlight than water droplets, so as these clouds heated and the ice melted, they became more reflective and caused cooling. The new models start with more realistic clouds containing more supercooled water, which allows other dynamics driven by warming—the penetration of dry air from above and a subduing of turbulence—to thin the clouds.

But that fix has allowed scientists to spy another bias previously countered by the faulty cooling trend. In both the old and new climate models, the patchy cumulus clouds that form in the tropics thin out in response to warming, allowing in more heat than satellite observations suggest, according to a study by Timothy Myers, a cloud scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. “Even though one feature of the climate is now more realistic, another that’s persistently biased has been revealed,” Myers says.

Graphic [Overheated

Climate models used by next month’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report project more warming over an 1850–1900 baseline than those in a 2013 report. Scientists are using recent observed warming to rein them in.]

By the time modelers exposed that bias, the supercomputing runs were already done and the IPCC report was nearing completion. And many of the hot models otherwise simulate the climate extremely well overall, doing a better job than their predecessors at capturing atmospheric connections between remote ocean basins and the distribution of rainfall. “You want a way you can use those models for what they have without getting stuck with their climate sensitivity,” Schmidt says.

So the IPCC team will probably use reality—the actual warming of the world over the past few decades—to constrain the CMIP projections. Several papers have shown how doing so can reduce the uncertainty of the model projections by half, and lower their most extreme projections. For 2100, in a worst-case scenario, that would reduce a raw 5°C of projected warming over preindustrial levels to 4.2°C. It’s good news for the modelers—but also a clear, and dismaying, sign that global warming has gone on long enough to help chart its own path, says Aurélien Ribes, a climate scientist at France’s National Centre for Meteorological Research. “Observations now provide a clear view for what climate change will be.”

The IPCC report is also likely to present the spatial impacts of different amounts of warming—2°C, 3°C, 4°C—rather than saying how quickly those impacts will be felt. That heat-based technique worked well in an interim IPCC report in 2018, on the impacts of 1.5°C of warming, and would preserve good information from the hot models, even if they suggest these thresholds will come too soon.

The modelers hope to do better next time around. Lamarque says they may test new simulations against recent paleoclimates, not just historical warming, while building them. He also suggests that the development process could benefit from more time, with updates every decade or so rather than the current report interval of every 7 years. And it could be helpful to divide the modeling process in two, with one track focused on scientific experimentation—when a large range of climate sensitivities is helpful—and the other on providing a best estimate to policymakers. “It’s not easy to reconcile these two approaches under a single entity,” Lamarque says.

A cadre of researchers dedicated to the task of translating the models into useful projections could also help, says Angeline Pendergrass, a climate scientist at Cornell University who helped develop one technique for weighting the model results by their accuracy and independence. “It’s an actual job to go between the basic science and the tools I’m messing around with,” she says.

For now, policymakers and other researchers need to avoid putting too much stock in the unconstrained extreme warming the latest models predict, says Claudia Tebaldi, a climate scientist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and one of the leaders of CMIP’s climate projections. Getting that message out will be a challenge. “These issues don’t translate very well in practice,” she says. “It’s going to be hard for people looking to make some projection of a water basin in the West to make sense of it.”

Already scientific papers are appearing using CMIP’s unconstrained worst-case scenarios for 2100, adding fire to what are already well-justified fears. But that practice needs to change, Schmidt says. “You end up with numbers for even the near-term that are insanely scary—and wrong.”