Language offers a unique window into psychology; natural-language processing & comparative linguistics are contributing to how we understand topics as diverse as emotion, creativity, & religion

From Text to Thought: How Analyzing Language Can Advance Psychological Science. Joshua Conrad Jackson et al. Perspectives on Psychological Science, October 4, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1177/17456916211004899

Abstract: Humans have been using language for millennia but have only just begun to scratch the surface of what natural language can reveal about the mind. Here we propose that language offers a unique window into psychology. After briefly summarizing the legacy of language analyses in psychological science, we show how methodological advances have made these analyses more feasible and insightful than ever before. In particular, we describe how two forms of language analysis—natural-language processing and comparative linguistics—are contributing to how we understand topics as diverse as emotion, creativity, and religion and overcoming obstacles related to statistical power and culturally diverse samples. We summarize resources for learning both of these methods and highlight the best way to combine language analysis with more traditional psychological paradigms. Applying language analysis to large-scale and cross-cultural datasets promises to provide major breakthroughs in psychological science.

Keywords: natural-language processing, comparative linguistics, historical linguistics, psycholinguistics, cultural evolution, emotion, religion, creativity

Applying Language Analysis in Psychological Science: Three Case Studies

Psychological science still has work to do before researchers can master NLP and comparative linguistic methods. We dedicate the rest of this article to illustrating how that might happen. First, we present Figure 4, which is a visual flowchart illustrating how the language-analysis methods discussed in this article can be employed to address psychological questions. We then summarize three case studies that demonstrate how NLP and comparative linguistics can yield new insights and increase the scale and diversity of study into three psychological constructs that have been notoriously difficult to study—emotion, religion, and creativity. In these sections, we highlight research that has used language analysis to address new questions or solve long-standing debates or that has used language-analysis methods to increase the scale or cultural diversity of research in these fields. This work illustrates the utility of language analysis for asking enduring psychological questions and foreshadows the potential of these tools to address psychological constructs across social, cultural, cognitive, clinical, and developmental psychology.

Fig. 4. A flowchart of different language-analysis methods and the kinds of questions they are best suited to answer. Orange boxes represent methods from comparative linguistics, and gray boxes represent methods from NLP. Black boxes approximate the questions that may guide researchers toward these methods. Concepts are defined here as the meaning associated with words. This is meant as a general guide for researchers interested in language analysis, and there is some overlap in classifications. For example, word embeddings can show how language conveys moods and attitudes, and colexification can sometimes uncover evolutionary dynamics.

Emotion

Questions and debates about the nature of human emotion have existed since the earliest days of psychological science (Darwin, 1872/1998; James, 1884; Spencer, 1894; Wundt, 1897) and are relevant to psychological questions pertinent to social, clinical, and developmental psychology. Language-analysis methods have already increased the scope of this long-standing field and generated original methods of addressing old debates.

One of the most enduring debates about emotions concern whether emotions are universal, inborn categories that possess little variation around the world or are socially learned categories that vary in their experience and conceptualization across cultures (Cowen & Keltner, 2020; Ekman & Friesen, 1971; Izard, 2013; Plutchik, 1991; Lindquist et al., 2012; Mesquita et al., 2016; Russell, 2003). We recently addressed this question by means of a comparative-linguistics approach using colexifications (Jackson, Watts, et al., 2019). This analysis allowed us to increase the scale and generalizability over previous field studies of cross-cultural differences in emotion that had relied on smaller sample sizes and two-culture comparisons (Bryant & Barrett, 2008; Ekman & Friesen, 1971; Gendron et al., 2014, 2015, 2020).

In our study, we computationally aggregated thousands of word-lists and translation dictionaries into a large database named “CLICS” (https://clics.clld.org/), and we used this database to examine colexification patterns of 24 emotion concepts across 2,474 languages. We constructed networks of colexification in which nodes represented concepts (e.g., “anger”) and edges represented colexifications (instances in which people had named two concepts with the same word), and then compared emotion colexification networks across language families. In contrast to Youn and colleagues (2016), who found universal colexification patterns involving concepts such as “sun” and “sky,” we found wide cultural variation in the colexification of emotion concepts such as “love” and “fear.” In fact, clusters of emotion colexification varied more than three times as much as the clustering patterns of colors—our set of control concepts—across language families (see Fig. 5). For example, “anxiety” was perceived as similar to “fear” among Tai-Kadai languages, but was more related to “grief” in Austroasiatic languages, suggesting that speakers of these language may conceptualize anxiety differently.

Fig. 5. The colexification structure of emotion concepts for all languages (top left) and for five individual language families in Jackson and colleagues (2019) analysis of emotion. Nodes are emotion concepts, and links between concepts represent the likelihood that these concepts will be colexified in a language. Color indicates semantic community, which refers to clusters of emotions that are similar in meaning. From Jackson, J. C., Watts, J., Henry, T. R., List, J. M., Forkel, R., Mucha, P. J., Greenhill, S., Gray, R. D., & Lindquist, K. A. (2019). Emotion semantics show both cultural variation and universal structure. Science, 366(6472), 1517–1522. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aaw8160. Reprinted with permission from AAAS.

The variability in emotion meaning that we observed was associated with the geographic proximity of language families, suggesting that the meaning of emotion may be transmitted through historical patterns of contact (e.g., warfare, trade) and common ancestry. We also found that emotions universally clustered together on the basis of their hedonic valence (whether or not they were pleasant to experience) and to a lesser extent, by their physiological activation (whether or not they involved high levels of physiological arousal), suggesting valence and physiological activation might be biologically based factors that provide “minimal” universality to the meaning of emotion. In sum, this study used an unprecedented sample of cultures to yield new insights into the structure and cultural variation of human emotion.

A different set of language-analysis studies involving NLP are improving how psychologists measure emotion and track it over time and across social networks. For example, in a study of unprecedented historical scale, Morin and Acerbi (2017) used sentiment analysis to examine English fiction from 1800 to 2000 to assess whether the expression of emotion had changed systematically over time. They found a decrease in positive (but not negative) emotions conveyed in language over history in three separate corpora of text. This change could not be explained by changing writer demographics (e.g., age and gender), vocabulary size, or genre (fiction vs. nonfiction), raising the possibility that something about emotion or its expression has itself changed over time.

Other studies have also used language analysis to track faster emotional dynamics, such as measuring the emotional qualities of social-media posts (Roberts et al., 2012; Yu & Wang, 2015) and testing whether the emotions of one person are likely to rapidly spread via language throughout that person’s social network. Such studies have shown experimentally that emotional sentiment conveyed by language on social-media websites (e.g., Facebook) is more likely to make individuals who view that language express similar emotions (Kramer et al., 2014). Correlational studies find that social-media information with high emotional content is more likely to be shared than information with low emotional content (Brady et al., 2017). These studies show how affect can spread across many social-media users in a short period of time.

Religion

The science of religion has a rich legacy equal to that of the psychology of emotion; many psychological studies have addressed questions about the social value and historical development of religion. Language analysis has recently begun answering both kinds of questions with a scope and ecological validity that was not possible with traditional methods.

NLP analyses have shed light on the positive and negative ways that religion affects happiness and intergroup relations. Some social theorists view religion as a primarily positive force because it reinforces social connections and promotes well-being (Brooks, 2007). On the other hand, “New Atheism” suggests that religion has a more negative effect on psychology by narrowing people’s worldviews and homogenizing the beliefs of religious adherents (Dawkins & Ward, 2006; Hitchens, 2008). Evidence for this debate has been mixed because of methodological challenges. For example, religious people frequently report more well-being than atheists in large national surveys, but they also show more social-desirability bias (Gervais & Norenzayan, 2012), which makes their self-reports less reliable.

NLP analyses are able to overcome these social-desirability limitations and have begun to show ecologically valid evidence that religion is linked to well-being. For example, Ritter et al. (2014) conducted a sentiment analysis of 16,000 users on Twitter and found that Christians expressed more positive emotion, less negative emotion, and more social connectedness than nonreligious users. Wallace et al. (2019) conducted a creative analysis of obituaries, finding that people whose obituaries mentioned religion had lived significantly longer than people whose obituaries did not mention religion, even controlling for demographic information.

Other NLP research has called the New Atheist proposition of religious worldview homogeneity into question. For example, Watts and colleagues (2020) analyzed the explanations that Christian and nonreligious participants generated to explain a wide range of supernatural and natural phenomena and estimated the overlap of these explanations as a measure of worldview homogeneity. If religion does indeed homogenize adherents’ worldviews, one would expect that religious people’s explanations would share greater overlap than nonreligious people’s explanations. Watts and colleagues (2020) used a text analysis approach known as Jaccard distances, which was able to estimate the similarity between participants’ explanations of the world using overlapping key words, and test whether religious people offered more homogeneous explanations than did nonreligious people. Using this algorithm, the researchers found that religious people’s explanations of supernatural phenomena were more homogeneous than nonreligious people’s explanations, but their explanations of natural phenomena (e.g., the prevalence of parasites) were more diverse than were nonreligious explanations, probably because they drew on supernatural as well as scientific concepts when explaining the natural world.

Comparative linguistics has mostly contributed to questions about how religion has developed over time across cultures. Many of these analyses have focused on the “supernatural monitoring hypothesis”: that watchful and punitive gods contributed to the evolution of social groups by increasing in-group prosociality and fostering large-scale cooperation (Johnson, 2016; Norenzayan et al., 2016). This idea is nearly a century old, arguably dating back to Durkheim (1912/2008), but most tests of the hypothesis have been correlational, and there is an ongoing debate about whether societies with large-scale cooperation tend to adopt moralistic religions or societies that adopt moralistic religions tend to be more cooperative (Whitehouse et al., 2019).

Researchers using comparative-linguistics methods recently addressed these debates by focusing on the development of religion in the Pacific Islands, where linguistic analyses have mapped out cultural phylogenies that can then be repurposed for cross-cultural research (R. D. Gray et al., 2009). Using these phylogenetic trees and implementing a method known as Pagel’s discrete (Pagel, 1999), Watts and colleagues (2015) inferred the probability that ancestor cultures had high levels of political complexity (indicating large-scale cooperation), the probability that they believed in supernatural punishment, and the probability that they worshiped moralizing high gods. Their results showed partial support for both sides of the debate about religion and cooperation. Broad supernatural punishment (e.g., punishment for violating taboos) tended to precede and facilitate political complexity. However, belief in watchful and punitive high gods (e.g., the Christian God) tended to occur only when societies were already politically complex.

Phylogenetic analyses have also shed light on the darker side of religious evolution, such as ritualized human sacrifice practices, which were common across the ancient world. According to the social-control hypothesis, ritual human sacrifice was used as a tool to help build and maintain social inequalities by demonstrating the power of leaders and instilling fear among subjugates. Yet evidence in support of this theory was based largely on individual case studies showing that higher classes often orchestrated ritual sacrifices (Carrasco, 1999; Turner & Turner, 1999). Watts and colleagues (2016) tested this prediction by examining patterns of ritual human sacrifice and social inequality across 93 Pacific societies that had been mapped onto an established language phylogeny (R. D. Gray et al., 2009). They found evidence that ritual human sacrifice often preceded, facilitated, and helped to sustain social inequalities, supporting the social-control hypothesis.

Creativity

Compared with the psychology of emotion and religion, that of creativity has a shorter history in psychology. Most psychologists agree that creativity contributes to personal feelings of self-fulfillment and societal innovation (Pratt & Jeffcutt, 2009; Wright & Walton, 2003), but the field is still exploring the best ways to measure creativity as a psychological construct. More than a dozen creativity-measurement paradigms exist in psychology. One such measure asks participants to name multiple uses for common household items such as article clips and bricks (Guilford, 1950), whereas others require participants to think of creative marketing schemes (Lucas & Nordgren, 2015) or draw an alien from another planet (Ward, 1994). In each paradigm, responses are qualitatively scored on creativity by trained research assistants. Although these tasks are themselves quite creative, the coding process can be onerous, and it can take months to obtain creativity ratings for a small behavioral study. Because these measures require custom tasks and laboratory settings, they are also rarely suitable for analyzing real-world creative behavior.

Language analysis has only recently been applied to study creativity, but NLP techniques are already advancing the measurement of creativity with paradigms that can be applied to both individuals in a small study as well as millions of people around the world. One such paradigm is “forward flow” (K. Gray et al., 2019). Forward flow asks people to free associate concepts, much like classic psychoanalysis methods. But rather than qualitatively deconstructing these free associations, forward flow uses word embeddings to quantitatively analyze the extent that present thoughts diverge from past thoughts. For example, because “dog” and “cat” are frequently used together in large corpora, “dog” → “cat” would not represent as much divergence as “dog” → “fortress,” which are less frequently used together. Forward flow correlates with higher creativity scores on validated behavioral tasks such as the multiple uses task, and creative professionals such as actors, performance majors, and entrepreneurs score highly on forward flow (K. Gray et al., 2019). Forward flow in celebrities’ social-media posts can even predict their creative achievement (K. Gray et al., 2019). Forward flow may represent a rich and low-cost measure that could help capture creativity across people and societies.

Other NLP analyses have captured creativity in terms of divergences from normative language (e.g., Kuznetsova et al., 2013). Much like an unorthodox-looking alien, unorthodox patterns of language can signal creativity. However, it can be difficult to distinguish nonnormative and creative language (e.g., “metal to the pedal,” which is a reformulation of “pedal to the metal”) from nonnormative and nonsensical language (e.g., “the metal pedal to”). Berger and Packard (2018) developed a potential solution to this problem in a study of the music industry and used this method to test how creativity related to a product’s success. Their approach first used topic modeling to develop words that frequently appeared in different genres of music. For instance, words about bodies and movement were often featured in dance songs, whereas words about women and cars were often featured in country music songs. The study next quantified each song from the sample on its typicality according to how much it used language typical of its genre. Analyzing these trends found that songs that broke from tradition and featured atypical language performed better than songs featuring more typical language, offering some evidence that people prefer creative cultural products.

Recent language-analysis studies have already made a considerable impact on the study of creativity and show the potential of NLP for capturing and quantifying variability in creativity across people and products. Although no comparative-linguistics research has examined creativity, this subfield also has great potential for examining whether creativity varies in its structure across cultures and how creativity has evolved across history. Some historical analyses suggest that creativity has been highest during periods of societal looseness—periods with less rigid social norms and more openness (Jackson, Gelfand, et al., 2019). But this research was done on American culture, and it is not clear whether these findings would generalize around the world.

Sexual differences in human cranial morphology: Is one sex more variable or one region more dimorphic?

Sexual differences in human cranial morphology: Is one sex more variable or one region more dimorphic? Marco Milella, Daniel Franklin, Maria Giovanna Belcastro, Andrea Cardini. The Anatomical Record, March 26 2021. https://doi.org/10.1002/ar.24626

Abstract: The quantification of cranial sexual dimorphism (CSD) among modern humans is relevant in evolutionary studies of morphological variation and in a forensic context. Despite the abundance of quantitative studies of CSD, few have specifically examined intra-sex variability. Here we quantify CSD in a geographically homogeneous sample of adult crania, which includes Italian individuals from the 19th and 20th centuries. Cranial morphology is described with 92 3D landmarks analyzed using Procrustean geometric morphometrics (PGMM). Size and shape variables are used to compare morphological variance between sexes in the whole cranium and four individual regions. The same variables, plus Procrustes form, are used to quantify average sex differences and explore classification accuracy. Our results indicate that: (a) as predicted by Wainer's rule, males present overall more variance in size and shape, albeit this is statistically significant only for total cranial size; (b) differences between sexes are dominated by size and to a lesser extent by Procrustes form; (c) shape only accounts for a minor proportion of variance; (d) the cranial base shows almost no dimorphism for shape; and (e) facial Procrustes form is the most accurate predictor of skeletal sex. Overall, this study suggests developmental factors underlying differences in CSD among cranial regions; stresses the need for population-specific models that describe craniofacial variation as the basis for models that facilitate the estimation of sex in unidentified skeletal remains; and provides one of the first confirmations of “Wainer's rule” in relation to sexual dimorphism in mammals specific to the human cranium.

Online men adopting a long-term mating strategy also displayed canines more than women adopting a long-term mating strategy; men show they can provide investment to court women which is more relevant to them than it is to men

Dependents as Signals of Mate Value: Long-term Mating Strategy Predicts Displays on Online Dating Profiles for Men. Mackenzie J. Zinck, Laura K. Weir & Maryanne L. Fisher. Evolutionary Psychological Science, Oct 8 2021. https://rd.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40806-021-00294-w

Abstract: Sexual strategies theory indicates women prefer mates who show the ability and willingness to invest in a long-term mate due to asymmetries in obligate parental care of children. Consequently, women’s potential mates must show they can provide investment – especially when women are seeking a long-term mate. Investment may be exhibited through financial and social status, and the ability to care for a mate and any resulting offspring. Men who care for children and pets (hereafter “dependents”) are perceived as high-quality mates, given that dependents signal an ability to invest; however, no studies have examined how dependents are associated with short-term and long-term mating strategies. Here, online dating profiles were used to test the predictions that an interactive effect between sex and mating strategy will predict displays of dependents, with long-term mating strategy predicting for men but not women. Moreover, this pattern should hold for all dependent types and, due to relative asymmetries in required investment, differences will be strongest regarding displays of children and least in non-canine pets. As expected, men seeking long-term mates displayed dependents more than men seeking short-term mates, but both men and women seeking long-term mates displayed dependents similarly. This pattern was driven mostly by canines. These findings indicate that men adopting a long-term mating strategy display their investment capabilities more compared to those seeking short-term mates, which may be used to signal their mate value.

Discussion

To begin, it should be noted that few women in our population declared interest in a short-term mate, which is consistent with previous work (e.g., Buss & Schmitt, 1993) as, due to differences in obligate parental investment, women tend toward a long-term mating strategy while men tend to seek short-term mates. This finding suggests that men’s mating strategies may be more flexible relative to women’s strategies. Also, it points to the need for future research on relationships, given Schacht and Borgerhoff-Mulder (2015) found that men and women reported being equally interested in short-term mating.

Displays of Dependents

We supported our predictions regarding the display of dependents as influenced by mating strategies. Men who were seeking long-term mates displayed dependents on their profiles significantly more than men seeking short-term mates. Men seeking long-term relationships may show dependents as a way of advertising their parenting abilities and willingness to provide resources, which align with women’s mate preferences (e.g., Bereczkei et al., 2010; Buss & Schmitt, 1993; Li & Kenrick, 2006). These preferences are generally stronger in women when seeking long-term relationships, as compared to women adopting short-term mating strategies, who tend to place a greater importance on physical attractiveness (Li & Kenrick, 2006, see also humor and sociability: Mehmetoglu & Määttänen, 2020) rather than resource and care provisioning (Buss & Schmitt, 1993).

These results show evidence of cross-sex mind-reading. Geher (2009) posits that it is advantageous for heterosexual individuals to determine the mate preferences of potential mates and then advertise those desired features. Cross-sex mind-reading may be a form of mating intelligence, whereby one anticipates what potential mates desire, leading to more successful courtship. Geher (2009) proposes that there are different types of cross-sex mind-reading that are relevant here: men’s ability to know the short- and long-term preferences of women, and women’s ability to know the short- and long-term preferences of men. His findings largely indicate that of these four types, the most accurate form is men reading women’s long-term preferences. His reasoning is that, “given the notoriously discriminating nature of females’ choices in mate selection…coupled with strong tendencies for females to pursue long-term mating strategies…there may be particularly strong pressure on males to ‘get it right’ when it comes to long-term desires of females” (p. 344). This study’s findings align well with those of Geher (2009), as well as his explanation. That is, men may be showing dependents when seeking a long-term mate because they know that women prefer men who show these abilities in this relationship context.

Predictions regarding the between-sex comparisons were, however, not supported: men and women seeking long-term mates displayed dependents in a similar fashion. The types of investment dependents may signal regarding their carer are irrelevant to men, apart from caring abilities: qualities of a good parent are valued by men seeking long-term mates (e.g., Jackson & Kirkpatrick, 2007) to maximize return (in terms of reproductive success) of their investment (e.g., Buss & Schmitt, 1993). Consequently, women may be displaying their dependents to advertise their caring abilities to entice men into a long-term commitment (i.e., cross-sex mind-reading; Geher, 2009). This explanation is supported by Goetz (2013), who showed women seeking long-term mates were more likely to present indicators of their parenting abilities than women seeking short-term mates, and compared to men seeking any mate, in their online personal advertisements.

Displays of Dependent Types

How daters displayed their dependents varied by type (e.g., canine, feline), though our prediction was unsupported: not only did the pattern in which children, canines, and other pets were displayed differ, but the magnitude of between-group differences was similar. However, the results do paint an informative picture; different dependents have specific qualities about them that may explain our findings.

Children were among the most frequently displayed dependents by men seeking long-term mates. Such findings are logical as Kemkes (2008) showed men pictured with children are perceived as having elevated financial and social status, as well as parenting abilities. Men enjoy this elevation of perceived status as children in Canada take, on average, roughly $250,000 to raise to adulthood (Brown, 2015), and financial status is linked with social standing, thus making them an indicator of their parent’s ability to accrue and provide financial resources (on top of caring abilities). Moreover, such investment is strongly desired by women seeking long-term mates (e.g., Buss & Schmitt, 1993), which could explain these men’s propensity to display them so frequently. Children were also the most frequently displayed dependent on the profiles of women seeking long-term mates. Children require considerable care, which mothers typically provide more than fathers (e.g., while their partners performed childcare on non-workdays, fathers engaged in leisure activities 47% of this time: Kamp Dush et al., 2017), making them strong signals of a woman’s caring abilities (Kemkes, 2008). Furthermore, women are presumably most likely to display a child given 80% of separated Canadian women have primary custody of their children (Government of Canada, 2015). Therefore, women may be using children to showcase their caring abilities (as men seek qualities of a good parent in long-term mates: Buss & Schmitt, 1993), to honestly inform a prospective mate of her current familial situation, or even to signal fecundity if said dater was in her reproductive prime.

Next, on the profiles of long-term oriented men, canines (alongside children) were the most frequently displayed dependent, significantly more than men seeking short- and women seeking long-term mates. This pattern follows our between-strategy and between-sex predictions and was likely the main driver of the results for dependents in general. Some studies have suggested canines are a strong signal for a male’s investment capacity and masculinity (Gray et al., 2015; Kogan & Volsche, 2020; Mitchell & Ellis, 2013; Tifferet et al., 2013), as well as dominance-related qualities (Alba & Haslam, 2015, which is also sought by women: Buss & Schmitt, 1993). The types of investment that canines signal in a male carer (i.e., social and financial status, caring abilities) are sought more by women under long-term mating contexts than short-term ones, which could explain the inclination for long-term oriented males to display them over short-term ones. This conjecture is largely supported by Tifferet et al., (2013) who found perceived dog ownership improves men’s value as long-term mates in the eyes of women. Men adopting a long-term mating strategy also displayed canines more than women adopting a long-term mating strategy. Again, this can be interpreted as men showing they can provide investment to court women which is more relevant to them than it is to men (e.g., Buss & Schmitt, 1993).

Finally, other pets—this variable mainly comprised of cats—were displayed infrequently. Men’s hesitancy to display them may in part be explained through the findings of Mitchell and Ellis (2013): men show awareness of Western perceptions of feline-ownership being more feminine, which has negative social connotations for men and may not be a trait that women seek in a potential mate (Kogan & Volsche, 2020). Moreover, if non-canine pets are weak signals of their carer’s investment capacity (as they require minimal investment), neither sex would be inclined to display them to attract a mate, which could also explain the lack of difference regarding the between-sex comparison.

Future Work and Limitations

Future work could continue to use SST to predict human behavior in naturalistic settings such as online dating profiles. Such contexts are important as they allow researchers to examine behavior that is difficult to manipulate in the laboratory and findings are more generalizable to the public (Leichsenring, 2004). Because mating motivates human behavior and cognition (Jones et al., 2013; Miller & Maner, 2011), which develop through evolutionary forces (Buss & Schmitt, 1993), understanding how humans show that they are a valuable mate can further our understanding of the underlying drives for these processes.

As an immediate next step, future research could explore whether daters who show dependents are more successful in attracting a mate. This could be done by analyzing the number of profile-clicks or time spent observing a profile by prospective mates. Such findings could support the idea that dependents are honest signals of their carer’s investment capacity if sex- and mating strategy-specific differences are found. Additionally, to support (or weaken) the argument regarding pets as signals of caring abilities, whether people with pets make better parents should be examined.

This study was also conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Though one would think this level of environmental danger could influence human mating strategies (e.g., mate selection criteria become relaxed during times of increased species mortality; Reeve et al., 2016), we do not think this played a role in our findings as sampling occurred after a sharp decrease in viral presence, resulting in restrictions on social movements being relaxed (Nova Scotia’s weekly percent positivity per 100,000 population was between 0.0 and 0.2, rest of Canada between 0.8 and 1.1; see Public Health Agency of Canada, 2021). However, we procured two other samples in the late fall of 2020 which saw a resurgence of cases and intend to collect more samples as the pandemic continues. We hope to use these data to analyze whether a global pandemic influences how men (and women) display their investment capacity (i.e., via dependents) in an online mating context.

There are two main limitations of this study. First, daters were assumed to adopt a certain mating strategy according to their intent for online dating. Though online presences permit an opportunity for deceitful self-representation, dishonest advertisement decreases as the probability of meeting increases in mating contexts (Finkel et al., 2012; Gibbs et al., 2006; Guadagno et al., 2012). Overall, it was assumed daters were relatively honest in their profile construction as their indicated reasons for being on the platform implied a future meeting with a prospective mate. Haselton et al., (2005) showed that women, more than men, report previous long-term mates misconstrued their mating intentions to coerce a sexual encounter. If this was the case in this study, we would have incorrectly categorized men adopting a short-term mating strategy as adopting a long-term mating strategy which could have produced artificial (or hidden) differences between groups if these men were or were not displaying dependents. For a more accurate understanding of a dater’s true intentions, daters could be assessed using the Sociosexual Orientation Inventory (for example, see Jackson & Kirkpatrick, 2007) to determine whether daters leaned toward short-term or long-term mating, before recording their profile’s content. Overall, using SST to predict how people display their mate value on dating profiles is a valuable avenue of exploration, given individuals are seeking mating arrangements which reflect the need for physical encounters.

Second, the age of daters was left unrestricted. Age influences mating behaviour as it correlates with fertility (Conroy-Beam & Buss, 2019): with an increase in age, women’s fecundity decreases more sharply than men’s reproductive potential (Hill & Hurtado, 1991). Consequently, motives for mating change with age as well (McWilliams & Barrett, 2012): older women report seeking younger companions who can provide an active social life—rather than resources—and feel obliged to be a caretaker in later life. Men also seek out younger mates with caregiving abilities. Therefore, how these motives influence how middle- and later-aged individuals present their mate value in mating arenas deserves future consideration. For example, an extension of the current work may entail examining how daters in their reproductive prime, as well as those pre- and post-reproductive prime, display their dependents on an online dating platform.

The COVID-19 vaccination primes positive emotions which are known in the literature to promote cheating by increasing cognitive flexibility and lowering self-control

Tobol, Y., Siniver, E., & Yaniv, G. (2021). COVID-19 vaccination and subsequent dishonest behavior: Experimental evidence. Journal of Neuroscience, Psychology, and Economics, 14(3), 131–137. Oct 2021. https://doi.org/10.1037/npe0000146

Abstract: As of the beginning of 2021, the State of Israel, with a population of 9.3 million, had administered more coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) vaccine doses than all countries aside from China, the United States, and the United Kingdom. The vaccine is administered in two doses, 21–28 days apart from each other, which are necessary to confer adequate immunity. The present paper reports the results of a field experiment designed to examine the hypothesis that the COVID-19 vaccination stimulates subsequent dishonest behavior. Specifically, people relaxing after receiving the first and second vaccine doses as well as people waiting to receive the first dose were invited to perform a money-rewarding simple task which involves an opportunity to cheat with no possible detection. Before performing the task, subjects filled out a questionnaire regarding the emotions they were experiencing at that moment. We hypothesized that the COVID-19 vaccination primes positive emotions which are known in the literature to promote cheating by increasing cognitive flexibility and lowering self-control. Therefore, we predicted that (a) people vaccinated with the first dose are more likely to subsequently lie than people who have not yet taken the vaccine and (b) people vaccinated with the second dose are more likely to lie than people vaccinated with the first dose or people who have not yet taken the vaccine. The experiment’s results weakly support the first hypothesis but strongly support the second.

Depression: Households spend less overall, visit grocery stores less & convenience stores more frequently; spend a smaller share of their baskets on fresh produce & alcohol but a larger share on tobacco, no changes in cakes, candy & salty snacks

Meckel, Katherine and Shapiro, Bradley, Depression and Shopping Behavior (September 30, 2021). SSRN: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3934028

Abstract: Using a large survey panel that connects household shopping behavior with individual health information, this paper documents correlations between self reported depression and the size and composition of shopping baskets. First, we find that roughly 16% of individuals report suffering from depression and over 30% of households have at least one member who reports suffering from depression. Households with a member suffering from depression exhibit striking differences in shopping behavior: they spend less overall, visit grocery stores less and convenience stores more frequently and spend a smaller share of their baskets on fresh produce and alcohol but a larger share on tobacco. They spend similar shares on unhealthy foods like cakes, candy, and salty snacks. These cross-sectional correlations hold within counties, suggesting that they are not driven by region specific demographics or preferences that are incidentally correlated with depression status. They also hold when considering only single-member households. However, we rule out large differences in shopping behavior within households as they change depression status throughout the sample. Further, using the take-up of antidepressant drugs as an event, we document little change in shopping in response to treatment. With our results, we discuss the takeaways for health policy, decision modeling and targeted marketing.

Keywords: Mental Health, Economic Burden of Depression, Depression, Shopping, Household Panel Data

JEL Classification: I1, I10, I12, M31,

Paper retraction: Fraud and plagiarism accounted for 28.6 and 59.2% of women and men-authored retractions, respectively

Retraction according to gender: a descriptive study. Evelyne Decullier & Hervé Maisonneuve. Accountability in Research, Oct 7 2021. https://doi.org/10.1080/08989621.2021.1988576

Abstract: Although the underrepresentation of women in publication is a proven fact, there is no information on its counterpart: retractions. Using a previously studied cohort of retractions, the gender of the first author was checked manually to see if there was a similar pattern in the reasons for retraction for women and men authors. Out of 120 retractions, gender was identified for 113 (94.2%). A total of 42 (37.2%) retractions concerned publications authored by women and the reasons for retraction were significantly different between men and women authors. Overall, fraud and plagiarism accounted for 28.6 and 59.2% of women and men-authored retractions, respectively. These findings may have implications as regards training in responsible conduct in research; however, without further investigating larger cohorts and a better understanding of underlying mechanisms, it would be premature to draw any firm conclusions at this stage.

Keywords: Misconduct – retraction- gender

Child access prevention, minimum age requirements for gun purchases, and mandatory gun safety training laws exhibited weak and inconsistent relationships with school firearm incidents

Are gun ownership rates and regulations associated with firearm incidents in American schools? A forty-year analysis (1980–2019). Daniel Hamlin. Journal of Criminal Justice, Volume 76, September–October 2021, 101847. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcrimjus.2021.101847

Abstract

Purpose: This study examines the relationship between state gun ownership rates and school firearm incidents (n = 1275) and injured/killed victims (n = 2026) of these incidents over a forty-year period (1980–2019). It also investigates whether child access prevention, minimum age requirements for gun purchases, and mandatory gun safety training laws are associated with fewer school firearm incidents and injured/killed victims.

Methods: Data were linked together from the School Shootings Database, State Firearm Law Database, the National Center for Education Statistics, and the US Census Bureau. State fixed effects and interrupted time series analyses were performed.

Results: State gun ownership rates declined between 1980 and 2019 while school firearm incidents generally ranged between 20 and 40 incidents before skyrocketing to 102 incidents in 2018 and 110 incidents in 2019. Findings were mixed on the relationship between state gun ownership rates and school firearm incidents and injured/killed victims. Additionally, child access prevention, minimum age requirements for gun purchases, and mandatory gun safety training laws exhibited weak and inconsistent relationships with school firearm incidents.

Discussion: Although access to firearms plays an undeniable role in school shootings, it remains unclear what policies are needed to reduce these incidents. Future research may be needed to explore holistic approaches to addressing this problem.

Introduction

School shootings have become a pressing concern for the American public education system. In the United States, the number of shootings on school grounds is consistently higher than that of any other country in the world (Hahn et al., 2005). While many gun incidents in US schools do not lead to injury or death, a non-trivial number of devastating mass shootings occurring in the past decade have resulted in substantial numbers of victims and ignited intense gun control debates. One of these highly distressing incidents was in 2012 when a 20-year old with a history of mental health problems murdered six adults and twenty children between the ages of six and seven in a mass shooting at an elementary school in Connecticut (Langman, 2015). More recently in 2018, national attention became refocused on gun control after a 19-year old assailant killed fourteen students and four school staff at a high school in Florida where he had been previously expelled (Aslett, Webb Williams, Casas, Zuidema, & Wilkerson, 2020). Loss of life and psychological trauma are directly observable ramifications for schools and communities that experience a school shooting. The traumatic effects of these incidents also appear to extend beyond the location of the shooting itself, inflicting damage on the psyche, confidence, and wellbeing of the broader public (Collins, 2014; Newman, Fox, Harding, Mehta, & Roth, 2005).

Public outcry after major school shootings has spurred varying proposals for action from federal, state, and local officials (Schildkraut & Hernandez, 2014). While policy recommendations have ranged from arming teachers to strengthening mental health supports for troubled youth, gun control has been at the forefront of disputes over how to prevent school shootings (Rajan & Branas, 2018). Many states have enacted gun safety legislation following rampage-style school shootings (Schell, Cefalu, Griffin, Smart, & Morral, 2020). The main rationale for enhanced gun control is straightforward. The United States has both the highest rate of gun ownership and the greatest number of school shooting incidents in the developed world. Proponents of strong legal restrictions on firearms argue that these patterns demonstrate that guns are too accessible to those with mental health issues and a history of violence, making school shootings an inevitable consequence. Yet, opponents claim that gun prevalence is a response to existing crime and violence, and that restrictive gun laws violate the right to bear arms enshrined in the US Constitution by preventing law abiding citizens from owning guns (Stolzenberg & D'alessio, 2000).

In the empirical literature, many researchers have estimated correlational associations between gun ownership rates and general crime and violence, but this work is inconclusive (Kleck, 2015; Shetgiri, Boots, Lin, & Cheng, 2016; Siegel, Ross, & King III, 2013). Investigations of gun control regulations have exhibited more consistent associations with lower crime and violence (Andres & Hempstead, 2011; Fleegler et al., 2013; Hurka & Knill, 2020; Schell et al., 2020; Smith & Spiegler, 2020). For school-based incidents with firearms, empirical analyses are lacking. Nevertheless, there are compelling reasons to expect that high rates of gun ownership increase the likelihood of school firearm incidents as school shootings often involve weapons stolen by minors from family members, friends, and neighbors (Jeynes, 2020; Shetgiri et al., 2016). Some evidence on regulation is suggestive, indicating that laws holding gun owners criminally liable for negligent storage of firearms (e.g. child access prevention laws) are linked to lower prevalence of gun carrying in school (Anderson & Sabia, 2018; Fla. Stat. Ann. § 790.174, 2011; Hawaii Rev. Stat. § 134-10.5, 2011). Other scholarship on preventative measures is predominantly theoretical, drawing from threat assessment models (Cornell, 2020) or in-depth analyses of a subset of school shootings (Langman, 2009a). Broader empirical analysis is needed to launch a line of inquiry that can shed light on policy responses that might hold promise for reducing school shootings.

This study investigates the relationship between state gun ownership rates and school firearm incidents (n = 1275) and injured/killed victims (n = 2026) of these incidents from 1980 to 2019 in the United States. Over this forty-year period, it also examines whether child access prevention, minimum age requirements for gun purchases, and mandatory gun safety training laws are associated with decreases in school firearm incidents and injured/killed victims. For the analyses, data from the School Shootings Database were linked to data from the State Firearm Law Database, the National Center for Education Statistics, and US Census. State-level fixed effects models are performed to explore whether state-level gun ownership rates are related to the number of school firearm incidents and injured/killed victims. Interrupted time series analyses are then used to examine whether child access prevention, minimum age requirements for gun purchases, and mandatory gun safety training laws are associated with declines in school firearm incidents and injured/killed victims. This study provides a quantitative analysis of school firearm incidents over a forty-year period that has the potential to contribute to an underdeveloped literature. It may also raise important questions for gun policy and regulation.

Some evidence suggests that people behave more cooperatively and generously when observed or in the presence of images of eyes (termed the ‘watching eyes’ effect); replication failed

Rotella A, Sparks AM, Mishra S, Barclay P (2021) No effect of ‘watching eyes’: An attempted replication and extension investigating individual differences. PLoS ONE 16(10): e0255531. Oct 6 2021. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0255531

Abstract: Some evidence suggests that people behave more cooperatively and generously when observed or in the presence of images of eyes (termed the ‘watching eyes’ effect). Eye images are thought to trigger feelings of observation, which in turn motivate people to behave more cooperatively to earn a good reputation. However, several recent studies have failed to find evidence of the eyes effect. One possibility is that inconsistent evidence in support of the eyes effect is a product of individual differences in sensitivity or susceptibility to the cue. In fact, some evidence suggests that people who are generally more prosocial are less susceptible to situation-specific reputation-based cues of observation. In this paper, we sought to (1) replicate the eyes effect, (2) replicate the past finding that people who are dispositionally less prosocial are more responsive to observation than people who are more dispositionally more prosocial, and (3) determine if this effect extends to the watching eyes effect. Results from a pre-registered study showed that people did not give more money in a dictator game when decisions were made public or in the presence of eye images, even though participants felt more observed when decisions were public. That is, we failed to replicate the eyes effect and observation effect. An initial, but underpowered, interaction model suggests that egoists give less than prosocials in private, but not public, conditions. This suggests a direction for future research investigating if and how individual differences in prosociality influence observation effects.

Check also Stylized and photographic eye images do not increase charitable donations in a field experiment. Paul Lennon, Rachel Grant, and V. Tamara Montrose. Letters on Evolutionary Behavioral Science, Vol 8, No 2 (2017). https://www.bipartisanalliance.com/2017/09/stylized-and-photographic-eye-images-do.html

Discussion

This study examined if people were more prosocial in public, under “watching eyes”, or in a control condition with no-eyes. We failed to replicate the previously reported eyes and observation effects. Our results suggest that prosocial disposition (as measured by social value orientation) relates to responses to reputational incentives, where SVO prosocials gave similar amounts in both public and private conditions, but SVO egoists give less than prosocials in private conditions. Only SVO was a consistent predictor of dictator game donations, with prosocials giving more than egoists. Below we discuss each of these results and study limitations.

Failed replications: Observation and ‘watching eyes’ effects

Our manipulation check found that participants felt more observed in the public condition compared to both the eyes and no eyes conditions, suggesting that our public manipulation worked. Despite this, participants did not give more in the dictator game in the public condition compared to the eyes and control conditions. That is, we did not find an observation effect. This result was surprising, given that many prior studies suggests that people are more generous when they are being watched [6–9,11–16,39].

Based on the effect size for watching eyes in a prior study using similar methodology (i.e., short exposure to eyespots; Cohen’s f of .21 [23]), our sample of 355 participants would have given us 95% power to detect the eyes effect and observation effect. Despite this, we did not replicate the canonical “watching eyes” effect. Thus, our first prediction was not supported.

Our result is consistent with several recent failed replications [33–39]. Notably, a recent meta-analysis argues that eyes effects are effective at reducing antisocial behavior, with the speculation that images of eyes may be more effective at reducing bad behaviours than increasing good ones [32]. Watching eyes may not be particularly effective at increasing prosocial behaviours.

Reputation and social value orientation

In our pre-registered analysis, egoists did not give less than prosocials across all three conditions. However, we conducted an exploratory analysis where we combined the no eyes control condition and eyes condition into a single private condition to replicate the analyses in a prior study [39]. Although the overall analysis did not reach statistical significance, egoists gave less than prosocials in private conditions, but not in public conditions. This finding is consistent with the prior study [39], where proselfs (egoists and competitors combined) contributed less in private conditions, whereas prosocials did not. This result suggests that egoists give less than prosocials in a dictator game when anonymous. When comparing dictator game allocations among egoists in public and private conditions we did not find any differences. Given that egoists give less than prosocials in anonymous conditions, this suggests that the strategic motives of egoists are different than that of prosocials. Notably, this analysis was underpowered and we cannot draw definitive conclusions whether SVO relates to responses to observation.

Although we had a larger sample in this study compared to Simpson and Willer (2008; [39]), they used a decision with consequences as their primary dependent measure (i.e., participants were informed that a third party could see their decision and use it to inform a subsequent decision). Their manipulation was likely stronger than a decision without consequences, as employed in the present study. It is worth noting, however, that our study was underpowered to find this effect; we could not match the SVOs of approximately 44% of participants due to an error in survey administration. Nevertheless, this is the third study suggesting that SVO may relate to responses to reputation-relevant stimuli and emotions; future studies should continue to investigate the role of individual differences in reputation-based responses.

Notably, our results are suggestive of gender effects in response to reputation-based cues. Researchers have previously proposed gender differences in prosociality [57,58], though see meta-analysis in [59], and recent research finds that people expect women to be more prosocial than men [58]. These findings suggest that there may be gender differences in reputational costs/benefits for acting prosocial in public contexts, which should be further investigated.

Limitations

The most notable limitation in this study is our sample size. Although our sample was sufficient to replicate the observation and eyes effects, given prior samples (we had 95% power), we could not match the SVOs to their in-lab data of for a large proportion of participants, limiting our ability to draw conclusions about how SVO influences participants responses to reputation-based cues. These results should therefore be interpreted with caution. Despite this limitation, our sample size is much larger than those included in the original study (189 participants, compared to 89 and 70 in two studies [39]). This larger sample can provide a more accurate effect size to estimate power and sample sizes for future studies.

Another possible limitation to our study is that participants gave close to ceiling in the dictator game (i.e., $5) in all conditions (overall M = 4.06, SD = 2.00; all medians = 5), which may have limited our ability to find an observation effect. In fact, 62.4% of participants gave at ceiling in the public condition, and 53.6% in the private condition. However, prior research on eyes effects with a dictator game also found high allocations in the control condition (i.e., $4 out of $10) and found that images of watching eyes increased dictator game allocations beyond $4 [23]. Given that our study used similar methodology as Sparks and Barclay (2013) [23], we can conclude that we failed to replicate the eyes effect in this study. Participants did not report feeling more observed in the presence of eyes and did not give more money in a dictator game when images of eyes were present compared to the control condition. We also failed to replicate an observation effect, despite people feeling more observed in the public condition compared to the control condition, which suggests that people may not always increase cooperation when there are reputational incentives. Notably, many studies investigating observation and eyes effects do not include manipulation checks to confirm if participants feel observed. Future research could investigate when and why we would expect observation effects to occur and should include manipulation checks to confirm the experimental manipulation.

Additionally, people in our anonymous control condition (i.e., no eyes control) reported feeling somewhat observed, likely because they were in a lab environment, where there are some cues of observation such as the presence of other participants and the experimenter [59,60]. Although participants in the public condition reported feeling more observed than those in the control and eyes conditions, their scores were close to the midpoint of the scale, which suggests that participants in the public condition didn’t feel particularly observed. Notably, perceptions of observability were not correlated with dictator game allocations (see supplementary material).

A recent meta-analysis found that decisions with consequences—where participants expected their behaviours to influence how others will respond to them within the experimental protocol—produced larger observation effects on economic game allocations than decisions without consequence (rs of 0.25 and 0.12 respectively; [14]). The dictator game decision in this experiment was a decision without consequence, which may have limited the strength of our manipulation. However, studies using similar methodologies in small group sessions (as in this study) have reported eyes effects [20,23]. We also note that the ‘revelation moment’ differed between the eyes condition and public condition. In the eyes condition, reputational cues (eyes) were revealed right before the dictator game decision, whereas in the public condition participants were told more in advance that others would see their decisions, but the decisions were only made known to others after all decisions were made. Although both of these conditions are comparable to our control condition, these methodological differences may alter participants’ response patterns and should be considered when designing future studies.

Moreover, there are methodological similarities between SVO measures and the dictator game, where both measures ask participants to divide resources. In the present experiment, a key difference is that the dictator game is incentivized and continuous, while the SVO task is a series of hypothetical forced-choice scenarios. A conceptual replication with another measure of prosocial (or antisocial) behavior is needed to determine the generalizability of how SVO relates to prosocial behaviors.

Given the limitations outlined above, future research should investigate individual differences in observation and ‘watching eyes’ effects using dependent measures with greater reputational benefits or costs (see [32]). Moreover, future studies could use the SVO slider measure [47], as opposed to the triple-dominance measure employed in the present study. The SVO slider measure is a continuous measure as opposed to categorical, allowing a more precise classification of participants’ level of SVO [47]. However, SVO is a narrow personality construct, which may limit the ability to detect individual differences in reputation-based effects. Future studies could also examine if broader personality constructs, such as HEXACO Honesty-Humility or Agreeableness [58] are associated with differential response to reputation-based cues.

Contributions

This study adds to the literature in several ways. Using established methodology, our aggregate data provide a well-powered attempted replication of the eyes effect (which excludes individual difference data based on SVO). Additionally, our results are suggestive that individual differences may influence how people respond to reputation-based cues. These findings are in the same direction as Simpson and Willer’s (2008; [39]) finding that people who are less prosocial (i.e., SVO egoists) are more likely to calibrate their decisions according to reputation-based cues, whereas SVO prosocials are consistently prosocial. Although our study was underpowered to detect individual differences, our sample size is much larger than the original study [39]. These results can inform future research methodologies; future studies should use observation manipulation with consequences, broader personality variables, and a dependent measure with higher reputational benefits or costs to participants to investigate reputation-based effects.