Across experiments, & contrary to our expectations, threat increased liberal—but not conservative—men’s preference for a wide range of aggressive political policies and behaviors (e.g., the death penalty, bombing an enemy country)

DiMuccio, Sarah, and Eric Knowles. 2022. “Something to Prove? Manhood Threats Increase Political Aggression Among Liberal Men.” PsyArXiv. October 21. doi:10.31234/osf.io/qnpw4

Abstract: Manhood is a precarious state that men seek to prove through the performance of masculine behaviors—including, at times, acts of aggression. Although correlational work has demonstrated a link between chronic masculine insecurity and political aggression (i.e., support for policies and candidates that communicate toughness and strength), experimental work on the topic is sparse. Existing studies also provide little insight into which men—liberal or conservative—are most likely to engage in political aggression after threats to their masculinity. The present work thus examines the effects of masculinity threat on liberal and conservative males’ tendency toward political aggression. We exposed liberal and conservative men to various masculinity threats, providing them with feminine feedback about their personality traits (Experiment 1), having them paint their nails (Experiment 2), and leading them to believe that they were physically weak (Experiment 3). Across experiments, and contrary to our initial expectations, threat increased liberal—but not conservative—men’s preference for a wide range of aggressive political policies and behaviors (e.g., the death penalty, bombing an enemy country). Integrative data analysis (IDA) reveals significant heterogeneity in the influence of different threats on liberal men’s political aggression—with the most effective being intimations of physical weakness. A multiverse analysis suggests that these findings are robust across a range of reasonable data-treatment and modeling choices. Possible sources of liberal men’s heightened sensitivity to manhood threat are discussed.

The Role of Ideology

The link between masculinity and conservative political ideology is well-established. In our own work, we have found that chronic masculine insecurity predicts voting for Republican presidential and congressional candidates (DiMuccio & Knowles, 2020). In other research, threats to masculinity increased men’s support for Donald Trump—an effect mediated by the desire for a highly masculine president (Carian & Sobotka, 2018). Other studies have revealed a strong link between masculinity and conservatism including robust cultural associations between “Republican” and “masculine” (Katz, 2016; M. L. McDermott, 2016; Winter, 2010) and a tendency for political conservatives to endorse traditional gender and sex-role beliefs (Feather et al., 1979; Sharrow et al., 2016). Given this link, we were surprised to find that it was liberal—not conservative—men who reacted with increased political aggression to manhood threat. We propose three potential explanations for this unexpected finding.

First, it may be that our dependent measures of political aggression (e.g., support for military intervention and the death penalty) failed to allow sufficient room for movement among conservative participants, who already strongly endorsed such positions. Indeed, we observed a ceiling effect in which 17% of our conservative male participants scored at or near the scale maximum across studies and measures (Terwee et al., 2007). This was not the case for liberal participants, who either opposed aggressive policies less (Experiments 1 and 2) or became supportive them (Experiment 3) after a threat to their manhood. Manhood threat may nonetheless cause conservative men to venture outside the range of socially-sanctioned political aggression (e.g., military intervention) into the realm of violent extremism (as exemplified the 2021 Capitol insurrection). If this is correct, then more extreme measures of political aggression would allow such an effect to emerge. By increasing the extremity of aggressive political options, researchers can allow for effects of masculinity threat to emerge among conservative men, while also shedding light on the recent rise of right-wing extremism in the U.S. (Kapur, 2021).

Second, it may be that liberal men are genuinely more vulnerable to masculinity threat in political contexts. In light of the fact that people stereotype liberals as feminine and conservatives as masculine (Katz, 2016; Rudman et al., 2013; Winter, 2010), it stands to reason that liberal men are especially eager not to exhibit feminine traits in the political realm. In other words, perhaps liberals experience stereotype threat (Spencer et al., 1999) with respect to their masculinity. In our studies, then, liberal men may have reacted to threat with heightened political aggression in order to avoid confirming a (presumably) negative stereotype of their ideological group. Suggesting that this stereotype is, in fact, negative, accusations of femininity constitute a recurring attack line against liberal politicians, presidents, and laypeople—from both the left (Dowd, 2006; Prabhu, 2016) and the right (Fahey, 2007; French, 2015). Conversely, aggression and masculinity are widely regarded as positive political qualities in American politics (Ducat, 2004; Fahey, 2007; Katz, 2016; Messner, 2007), rendering “feminized” liberal men stereotype-incongruent in political contexts (Bauer & Carpinella, 2018). Future research should further examine the possibility that liberal men experience a form of gendered stereotype threat in the realm of politics.

Research has found that liberals become more conservative in their attitudes when exposed to system threats (a phenomenon termed conservative shift; (Bonanno & Jost, 2006; Nail et al., 2009; Nail & McGregor, 2009). This raises the question of whether our findings might reflect a conservative shift among liberals rather than an increase in their political aggression per se. We believe the answer may be found in our findings regarding nonaggressive policies, such as attitudes toward Obamacare, affirmative action, and other social-welfare policies. Such stances have clear (liberal) ideological content. Thus, if masculinity threat were simply causing liberals to become more conservative, we should have observed liberals endorse such policies less under threat. We did not, however, observe any reliable effect of masculinity threat on such ideologically-laden, yet nonaggressive, attitude dimensions. We therefore believe the present findings reflect a “aggressive shift” that is not reducible to a conservative shift.

Limitations and Future Directions

This research has several limitations. First, our experiments did not include manipulation checks. We chose not to include such checks out of concern that doing so would have hinted at the true intentions of the research. This, unfortunately, means that we cannot know whether and to what extent the participants perceived each threat manipulation to challenge their masculinity. While our manipulations had face validity, future research should systematically measure the extent to which each type of manipulation employed in the present research is experienced as a threat to masculinity.

Second, our samples were disproportionately politically left-leaning. It is possible that we would have seen differences by threat across the political spectrum (and not only for left-leaning men) if we had had access to a greater number of highly conservative participants. To investigate this possibility, using the combined dataset, we plotted the estimated effects of masculinity threat on aggressive policy endorsement at every point on the conservatism scale. As can be seen in Figure S1, despite widening of the 95% confidence intervals due to the relatively small number of conservatives in the sample, there is no suggestion of a threat effect emerging at the highest levels of conservatism. Despite the lack of evidence for masculinity threat among conservatives, a definitive test awaits research that includes a large number of extremely conservative men.

Finally, our indicators of political aggression tend to be ones that conservatives endorse. This necessarily makes it difficult (though, as discussed above, not impossible) to tease apart aggressive responses from merely conservative ones. As such, future research should examine the extent to which threats might cause men to employ more aggressive methods to reach whatever their political ends may be. Perhaps, for instance, manhood threats would cause conservative men to embrace more aggressive means of passing gun rights legislation while also causing liberal men to embrace more aggressive means of passing social-welfare legislation. Such a study of political strategy (as opposed to outcomes) is a promising avenue for future investigation.

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Final version

Something to Prove? Manhood Threats Increase Political Aggression Among Liberal Men. Sarah H. DiMuccio & Eric D. Knowles. Sex Roles, Mar 10 2023. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11199-023-01349-x

Abstract: Manhood is a precarious state that men seek to prove through the performance of masculine behaviors—including, at times, acts of aggression. Although correlational work has demonstrated a link between chronic masculine insecurity and political aggression (i.e., support for policies and candidates that communicate toughness and strength), experimental work on the topic is sparse. Existing studies also provide little insight into which men—liberal or conservative—are most likely to display increased political aggression after threats to their masculinity. The present work thus examines the effects of masculinity threat on liberal and conservative men’s tendency toward political aggression. We exposed liberal and conservative men to various masculinity threats, providing them with feminine feedback about their personality traits (Experiment 1), having them paint their nails (Experiment 2), and leading them to believe that they were physically weak (Experiment 3). Across experiments, and contrary to our initial expectations, threat increased liberal—but not conservative—men’s preference for a wide range of aggressive political policies and behaviors (e.g., the death penalty, bombing an enemy country). Integrative data analysis (IDA) reveals significant heterogeneity in the influence of different threats on liberal men’s political aggression, the most effective of which was intimations of physical weakness. A multiverse analysis suggests that these findings are robust across a range of reasonable data-treatment and modeling choices. Possible sources of liberal men’s heightened responsiveness to manhood threats are discussed.

General Discussion

The present findings provide support for our hypothesis that threats to men’s (but not women’s) gender status leads to an increase in political aggression, defined as attitudes or behavior that communicate toughness, strength, or force. At the same time, our findings run directly counter to our initial prediction as to which men—liberals or conservatives—would be most affected by masculinity threat. Although we hypothesized that conservative men would increase in political aggression after masculinity threat, they did not; instead, across our three experiments, it was liberal men who exhibited increased political aggression after a manhood threat.

In Experiment 1, we found that a personality-based false feedback manipulation, in which men learned they possessed traits resembling that of the average woman, significantly increased liberal—but not conservative—men’s endorsement of aggressive political policies (e.g., the death penalty). Consistent with our hypotheses, gender threat had no effect on endorsement of nonaggressive policies, or on women’s endorsement of either policy type. In Experiment 2, we found that a behavioral manipulation, in which men engaged in a stereotypically feminine behavior (applying pink nail polish) increased liberal—but not conservative—men’s support for an aggressive approach to a foreign-policy dilemma. We again observed no effect of threat on men’s endorsement of nonaggressive approaches. Finally, in Experiment 3, we found that a strength-based false feedback manipulation, in which men learned their handgrips were only as strong as the average woman’s, caused liberal—but not conservative—men to become more supportive of both aggressive policies and foreign-policy strategies. Once again, manhood threat affected support for aggressive, but not nonaggressive, political policies and strategies.

While liberal men increased significantly in political aggression in all three experiments, and conservative men in none of the experiments, the difference between the threat effect for liberals and conservatives was not always significant. Specifically, ideology did not significantly moderate men’s threat-induced political aggression in Experiment 2, and did so in Experiment 3 only for vignette responses. Nonetheless, our Integrative Data Analysis (IDA; Curran & Hussong, 2009) pooling the evidence across experiments suggests a significant difference in liberals’ and conservatives’ threat responses overall. A multiverse analysis (Steegen et al., 2016) of the combined data indicated that our results are highly robust to different data-treatment and modeling choices. Taken together, then, our results tell a consistent story in which liberal men show a greater tendency to reaffirm their masculinity after manhood threats by embracing more aggressive political views.

Manhood Threats

The present research allows us to compare the relative impact of three different kinds of manhood threats on liberal men. Predictions derived from the IDA revealed that the strength-based threat manipulation in Experiment 3 produced the strongest effect on aggressive policy endorsement. This suggests that intimations of physical weakness represent an especially powerful threat to liberal men’s masculinity—and, more broadly, that the onus on men to display physical strength is highly salient in American society (Frederick et al., 2017). Our personality-based threat manipulation in Experiment 1, in which men were led to believe they possessed stereotypically feminine personalities, yielded the second-strongest effect on political aggression among liberal men. Interestingly, Experiment 2’s behavioral threat manipulation, in which men were compelled to paint their nails pink, produced the weakest threat effect. This may imply that engaging in a feminine behavior at the clear behest of an experimenter does not impugn men’s masculinity as drastically as does information that one’s personal qualities, whether physical (Experiment 3) or psychological (Experiment 1), are truly feminine. This pattern of results suggests that, in the political domain, advertising that impugns men’s physical strength, or suggests that men possess feminine personality traits, may be highly effective in shifting liberal men’s electoral and policy preferences in an aggressive direction. These results are also consistent with previous research showing that public (vs. private) threats tend to be most problematic for men (Weaver et al., 2013). In our research, the experiment that induced threat in a public space (Experiment 3) produced stronger results than threats experienced in private (Experiments 1 and 2). It is worth noting, however, that both public and private threats “worked”— suggesting that, to some extent, participants wish to demonstrate to themselves that they are adequately masculine.

The Role of Ideology

The link between masculinity and conservative political ideology is well-established. Past work has found that chronic masculine insecurity predicts voting for Republican presidential and congressional candidates (DiMuccio & Knowles, 2021). In other research, threats to masculinity increased men’s support for Donald Trump—an effect mediated by the desire for a highly masculine president (Carian & Sobotka, 2018). Other studies have revealed a strong link between masculinity and conservatism including robust cultural associations between “Republican” and “masculine” (Katz, 2016; McDermott, 2016; Winter, 2010) and a tendency for political conservatives to endorse traditional gender and sex-role beliefs (Feather et al., 1979; Sharrow et al., 2016). Given this link, we were surprised to find that it was liberal—not conservative—men who reacted with increased political aggression to manhood threat. We propose four potential explanations for this unexpected finding.

First, it may be that our dependent measures of political aggression (e.g., support for military intervention and the death penalty) failed to allow sufficient room for movement among conservative participants, who already strongly endorsed such positions. Indeed, we observed a ceiling effect in which 17% of our conservative male participants scored at or near the scale maximum across studies and measures (Terwee et al., 2007). This was not the case for liberal participants, who either opposed aggressive policies less (Experiments 1 and 2) or became supportive them (Experiment 3) after a threat to their manhood. Manhood threat may nonetheless cause conservative men to venture outside the range of socially-sanctioned political aggression (e.g., military intervention) into the realm of violent extremism (as exemplified the 2021 Capitol insurrection). If this is correct, then more extreme measures of political aggression would allow such an effect to emerge. By increasing the extremity of aggressive political options, researchers can allow for effects of masculinity threat to emerge among conservative men, while also shedding light on the recent rise of right-wing extremism in the U.S. (Kapur, 2021).

Second, it is possible that, compared to liberals, conservatives are higher in chronic concern for masculinity—and that this blunts the impact of transient threat inductions on their political attitudes. If this is the case, then the effects of masculinity threat may already be “baked in” to conservative men’s political attitudes. Future research should carefully parse out the effects of, and interactions between, trait vs. state levels of masculine insecurity.

Third, it may be that liberal men are genuinely more vulnerable to masculinity threats in political contexts. In light of the fact that people stereotype liberals as feminine and conservatives as masculine (Katz, 2016; Rudman et al., 2013; Winter, 2010), it stands to reason that many liberal men are especially eager not to exhibit feminine traits in the political realm. In other words, perhaps liberals experience stereotype threat (Spencer et al., 1999) with respect to their masculinity. In our studies, then, liberal men may have reacted to threat with heightened political aggression in order to avoid confirming a (presumably) negative stereotype of their ideological group. Suggesting that this stereotype is, in fact, negative, accusations of femininity constitute a recurring attack line against liberal politicians, presidents, and laypeople—from both the left (Dowd, 2006; Prabhu, 2016) and the right (Fahey, 2007; French, 2015). Conversely, aggression and masculinity are widely regarded as positive political qualities in American politics (Ducat, 2004; Fahey, 2007; Katz, 2016; Messner, 2007), rendering “feminized” liberal men stereotype-incongruent in political contexts (Bauer & Carpinella, 2018). Future research should further examine the possibility that liberal men experience a form of gendered stereotype threat in the realm of politics.

Fourth, research has found that liberals become more conservative in their attitudes when exposed to system threats (a phenomenon termed conservative shift; Bonanno & Jost, 2006; Nail et al., 2009; Nail & McGregor, 2009). This raises the question of whether our findings might reflect a conservative shift among liberals rather than an increase in their political aggression per se. We believe the answer may be found in our findings regarding nonaggressive policies, such as attitudes toward Obamacare, affirmative action, and other social-welfare policies. Such stances have clear (liberal) ideological content. Thus, if masculinity threat were simply causing liberals to become more conservative, we should have observed liberals endorse such policies less under threat. We did not, however, observe any reliable effect of masculinity threat on such ideologically laden, yet nonaggressive, attitude dimensions. We therefore believe the present findings reflect a “aggressive shift” that is not reducible to a conservative shift.

We see another possible—though more speculative—explanation for the fact that masculinity threat increased political aggression more among liberals than among conservatives. Specifically, it may be that liberals and conservatives are distinguished by a differential tendency to repair masculinity in public vs. private contexts. If conservatives only see the utility of performing reparative behaviors in public, while liberals engage in such behaviors in public or private, it might explain liberals’ relatively large threat-induced increase in political aggression in the present experiments. Indeed, two of three studies (Experiments 1 and 2) measured political aggression in private, laboratory contexts. Only Experiment 3 was conducted in a public space (a park), and perhaps not coincidentally produced the largest threat effects among conservative men. Although we know of no data or theory that specifically suggests a public–private distinction along ideological lines, little is known about factors that make public vs. private performance of manhood preferable. (We thank one of our reviewers for raising these issues.)

We wish to caution that, while our masculinity threats increased political aggression only among relatively liberal men, threat failed to close the gap between liberals’ and conservatives’ overall levels of political aggression. Indeed, conservatives displayed consistently and drastically stronger support for aggressive policies and vignette responses. This could be due to people’s longstanding ideological affinities, as aggressive political policies tend to be more conservative than nonaggressive policies. Despite these caveats, political liberals’ heightened susceptibility to messages that impugn their masculinity suggests that left-leaning men should be vigilant against attempts to manipulate their politics through such means.

Limitations and Future Directions

This research has several limitations. First, our experiments did not include manipulation checks. We chose not to include such checks out of concern that doing so would have hinted at the true intentions of the research. This, unfortunately, means that we cannot know whether and to what extent the participants perceived each threat manipulation to challenge their masculinity. While our manipulations had face validity, future research should systematically measure the extent to which each type of manipulation employed in the present research is experienced as a threat to masculinity.

Second, our samples were disproportionately politically left-leaning. It is possible that we would have seen differences by threat across the political spectrum (and not only for left-leaning men) if we had had access to a greater number of highly conservative participants. To investigate this possibility, using the combined dataset, we plotted the estimated effects of masculinity threat on aggressive policy endorsement at every point on the conservatism scale. As can be seen in Figure S1, despite widening of the 95% confidence intervals due to the relatively small number of conservatives in the sample, there is no suggestion of a threat effect emerging at the highest levels of conservatism. Despite the lack of evidence for masculinity threat among conservatives, a definitive test awaits research that includes a large number of extremely conservative men.

Finally, our indicators of political aggression tend to be ones that conservatives endorse. This necessarily makes it difficult (though, as discussed above, not impossible) to tease apart aggressive responses from merely conservative ones. As such, future research should examine the extent to which threats might cause men to employ more aggressive methods to reach whatever their political ends may be. Perhaps, for instance, manhood threats would cause conservative men to embrace more aggressive means of passing gun rights legislation while also causing liberal men to embrace more aggressive means of passing social-welfare legislation. Such a study of political strategy (as opposed to outcomes) is a promising avenue for future investigation.

Personality and hardiness differences between Norwegian police and psychology students: Police students are nicer

Personality and hardiness differences between Norwegian police and psychology students. Tom Hilding Skoglund, Patrick Risan, Rebecca Milne. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, October 13 2022. https://doi.org/10.1111/sjop.12877

Abstract: The present study investigated: (1) differences in personality traits and hardiness between police and psychology students; and (2) the relationship between personality traits and hardiness. To achieve these aims, we obtained scores using the Big Five Inventory-20 and the Dispositional Resilience Scale-15-R from n = 125 police students and n = 177 psychology students. Police students relative to psychology students, as expected, scored significantly higher on extraversion, conscientiousness, and emotional stability, and lower on openness. Further, the police students scored higher than psychology students on agreeableness, which was unexpected. For hardiness, police students also scored significantly higher than the psychology students. There was, however, no significant difference for the hardiness component of control. All Big Five traits (except agreeableness) predicted hardiness in a stepwise regression, where emotional stability was the strongest isolated predictor (β = 0.40). When treating hardiness as a dichotomized variable, for identifying those especially low or high on hardiness, openness was the strongest predictor for the high hardiness group: OR = 1.69 (95% CI 1.24–2.30). Margin plots revealed that increases in Big Five trait scores, except agreeableness, elevated the probability of belonging to the high hardiness group independent of field of study. We conclude that there is some support for a Norwegian ‘police student personality’. Additionally, we discuss nuances in the personality-relatedness of the hardiness construct based on results from a linear and logistic regression, respectively.

The young, those with low information literacy, and those with high trust in government tend to hold mistaken beliefs, even without exposure to misinformation; already misinformed, eventual exposure to fake news does little to influence them

Not who you think? Exposure and vulnerability to misinformation. Nicolas M Anspach, Taylor N Carlson. New Media & Society, October 19, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448221130422

Abstract: Is exposure to false information necessary for misbelief? In this article, we consider the possibility that certain individuals hold misinformed beliefs without encountering misinformation, thus questioning for whom exposure to “fake news” is most deleterious. Using a pre-registered experiment on a diverse sample of 1079 US respondents, we find that the young, those with low information literacy, and those with high trust in government tend to hold mistaken beliefs, even without exposure to misinformation. Because these groups are already misinformed, eventual exposure to fake news does little to influence their misperceptions. Instead, misinformation exposure affects the elderly, those with high information literacy, and those with low trust in mainstream media the most. These results suggest that research focused on correcting misperceptions should avoid studying how certain characteristics correlate with misbelief only in misinformation’s presence.

Student loans & the Income-Driven Repayment plan: Unfortunately, all the negative effects of the IDR proposal arise because of its generosity—the fact that nearly all borrowers will be asked to repay only a fraction of borrowed amounts

Biden's Income-Driven Repayment plan would turn student loans into untargeted grants. Adam Looney. Brookings Institution, September 15, 2022. https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/bidens-income-driven-repayment-plan-would-turn-student-loans-into-untargeted-grants/

There are several dimensions in which it is likely to have significant, unanticipated, negative effects.

* Increased borrowing. In 2016, undergraduate students borrowed $48 billion in federal student loans. But students were eligible to borrow an additional $105 billion that year and chose not to. Graduate students borrowed about $34 billion, but left $79 billion in unused eligibility on the table. Perhaps they didn’t borrow because their parents paid out of pocket or because they chose to save money by living at home—they still were eligible for federal loans. When those students are offered a substantial discount by paying with a federal loan, they will borrow billions more each year. (For more details, see below.)

* It subsidizes low-quality, low-value, low-earning programs and guts existing accountability policies. Because the IDR subsidy is based primarily on post-college earnings, programs that leave students without a degree or that don’t lead to a good job will get a larger subsidy. Students at good schools and high-return programs will be asked to repay their loans nearly in full. Want a free ride to college? You can have one, but only if you study cosmetology, liberal arts, or drama, preferably at a for-profit school. Want to be a nurse, an engineer, or major in computer science or math? You’ll have to pay full price (especially at the best programs in each field). This is a problem because most student outcomes—both bad and good—are highly predictable based on the quality, value, completion rate, and post-graduation earnings of the program attended. IDR can work if designed well, but this IDR imposed on the current U.S. system of higher education means programs and institutions with the worst outcomes and highest debts will accrue the largest subsidies.

* At the same time, the IDR proposal exempts failing programs from existing accountability policies like the Cohort Default Rate rules, which prohibit institutions from participating in federal grant and loan programs if too many of their students default on their loans. Under the proposal, certain students will be auto-enrolled in IDR, which can allow them to cease making payments without defaulting. It would be great to have a system in which default was not an option, but in today’s system, this eliminates the last remaining policy with any teeth that keeps predatory schools out of the loan program.

* High potential for abuse. A large share of student debt is not used to pay tuition, but is given to students in cash for rent, food, and other expenses. At public colleges and for-profits, living expenses represent more than half the estimated cost of attendance (which sets the upper limit on how much students can borrow). At many large for-profit schools (not known to leave money on the table), between 30% to 75% of student loans are returned to students in cash. (Indeed, I think this is a key reason anyone goes to these schools.)

* While students certainly need to pay rent and buy food while in school, under the administration proposal a student can borrow significant amounts for “living expenses,” deposit the check in a bank account, and not pay it all back. Gaming the system like this wasn’t possible when students were asked, on average, to repay loans in full, and it’s not a problem in systems where loans are used exclusively for tuition. But that’s not the system we have. Some people will use loans like an ATM, which will be costly for taxpayers and is certainly not the intended use of the loans.

* Who benefits is arbitrary, unequal, and unfair. As I’ve written in the past, a large share of student debt is owed by well-educated, white, financially successful students from upper-class families, which means that broad debt relief policies are regressive and preserve gaps between more and less advantaged groups instead of closing them. Compared to other federal spending programs intended to reduce poverty or benefit children, broad debt relief programs are more costly and benefit more advantaged Americans.

* Almost all undergraduate and graduate students will be eligible for reduced payments and eventual forgiveness under the proposal, which makes it effectively untargeted. Moreover, the amounts borrowers save (and eventually have forgiven) are based largely on the amounts students borrow, which means the benefits are uncapped and disproportionately flow to borrowers with the largest loans, who are more likely to be graduate students and students who attended more expensive programs. This makes it quite different, for example, from Biden’s recently announced debt relief plan, which focused relief on Pell Grant recipients, capped forgiveness at $20,000, and excluded high-income borrowers from participating.

* Likewise, while the IDR plan will reduce the amounts students ultimately pay for their education, it shouldn’t be confused with a policy to reduce or eliminate tuition and fees at public colleges like we do for public K-12 education. That’s because this IDR plan will cover a much larger range of costs: tuition and fees at for-profit and nonprofit schools, tuition and fees for graduate and professional school, and living expenses for college and graduate students. At many graduate programs, for example, a single graduate student living alone will be able to borrow more than $20,000 per year just for living expenses and never pay it back. For perspective, that is about double what a low-income single mother with two children can expect to get from the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and food stamps combined. (The EITC maximum benefit is $6,164, and the average food stamp benefit for a family of three is $520 per month.)

* College tuition for low-income and most middle-income families is already largely covered by other federal, state and private aid; why is the government making it a priority spend more to cover the cost of expensive colleges, graduate programs, and living expenses for upper-middle-class families instead of on policies that serve the truly disadvantaged?

* Tuition inflation. A common objection to unrestricted tuition subsidies is that it will cause institutions to raise tuition. There’s good evidence for this at for-profit schools. High-price law schools have designed schemes to take advantage of generous debt forgiveness plans called Loan Repayment Assistance Programs (LRAPs), plans under which universities and students effectively shift the cost of tuition to taxpayers by exploiting debt forgiveness programs. It’s plausible that some institutions will change prices to take advantage of the program.

* At the graduate level, it’s clear that many students will never pay their loans at existing tuition levels, and thus will be indifferent if those programs raise tuition. Given the caps that apply to undergraduate loans (which limit the amounts undergraduates can borrow to between $5,500 and $12,500 per year), there is little room for schools to increase revenue by increasing the amount that existing borrowers borrow. Instead, my belief is that increases in undergraduate financial aid increase college costs primarily by increasing the number of (lower-quality) programs and the students who enroll in them. My fear, with regards to overall college costs, is that institutions will have an incentive to create valueless programs and aggressively recruit students into those programs with promises they will be free under an IDR plan.

* Budget cost. While there are huge uncertainties about how many borrowers will enroll in the program and the behavioral responses, it’s plausible that the new IDR proposal will cost as much (or more) as the existing Pell Grant program over the next decade while being much, much worse than the Pell Grant program—for all the incentives described above, plus it isn’t targeted, as Pell is, at lower-income households.

Unfortunately, all the negative effects of the IDR proposal arise because of its generosity—the fact that nearly all borrowers will be asked to repay only a fraction of borrowed amounts.

Originality in online dating profile texts made the owner appear more intelligent, attractive, and worth a try

Originality in online dating profile texts: How does perceived originality affect impression formation and what makes a text original? Tess van der Zanden ,Alexander P. Schouten,Maria B. J. Mos,Emiel J. Krahmer. PLOS One, October 19, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0274860

Abstract: This paper investigates origins and consequences of perceived profile text originality. The first goal was to examine whether the perceived originality of authentic online dating profile texts affects online daters’ perceptions of attractiveness, and whether perceptions of (less) desired partner personality traits mediate this effect. Results showed the positive impact of perceived profile text originality on impression formation: text originality positively affects perceptions of intelligence and sense of humor, which improve impressions of attractiveness and boost dating intention. The second goal was to explore what profile text features increase perceptions of profile text originality. Results revealed profile texts which were stylistically original (e.g., include metaphors) and contained more and concrete self-disclosure statements were considered more original, explaining almost half of the variance in originality scores. Taken together, our results suggest that perceived originality in profile texts is manifested in both meaning and form, and is a balancing act between novelty and appropriateness.

General discussion

As far as we are aware, this is the first study that has focused on perceived originality in online dating profiles. In the perception study, we first investigated the effects of perceived profile text originality on impression formation. This was done by presenting actual users of web-based dating sites with dating profiles which they evaluated on the profile’s originality and the profile owner’s personality and attractiveness. Next, we conducted a content analysis to explore what characteristics in a dating profile text increase perceptions of profile text originality.

Results of the perception study show that higher scores on perceived intelligence and sense of humor mediate the positive relationship between perceived profile text originality and impressions of attractiveness and dating intention (H1 and H2). This positive correlation of perceived originality, intelligence, sense of humor, and attractiveness accords with correlations found in prior studies [26–28]. Contrary to the expectations in H3, we found that higher originality scores lead to lower rather than higher oddness scores. In line with our expectation, profile owners scoring higher on perceived oddness scored lower on attractiveness and dating intention.

The perception study data showed thus that, overall, perceptions of profile text originality positively affect impressions of the profile owner’s personality and attractiveness, but the content analysis provides insights into what profile text characteristics could increase these text originality perceptions. Our results reveal that primarily stylistic and self-disclosure features predicted higher text originality scores. It seems that profiles that were perceived as more original were more likely to contain fixed and novel metaphors (stylistic features), and more and concrete self-disclosures (self-disclosure features). Finally, profiles deemed original were less likely to be (fully) written from a self-perspective (perspective-taking feature).

Implications and directions for future research

This study yields several implications for theory and future studies on (the effects of) originality. First, our study reveals that a general consensus exists among the online dating site users of this study about what profile texts are original and not. Moreover, the participants showed high agreement on the owners of which profiles were considered odd, and these profiles scored low on originality. Consistent with the two-dimensional concept of creativity [12], this finding suggests that, without being instructed to do so, online daters apply novelty and appropriateness criteria to assess a profile’s originality; only profiles that are both novel and appropriate are considered original, profiles that are just novel are not. This raises the question where to draw the line between profiles that are novel but not appropriate, profiles that are appropriate but not novel, and profiles that are both novel and appropriate. A future study could investigate this by asking participants to evaluate the perceived novelty and appropriateness of a large set of texts instead of the text’s overall perceived originality.

Second, the results of the perception study show that online daters use profile originality as a cue to form impressions about profile owners. More specifically, it seems that a profile’s originality primarily leads to positive impressions, both with regard to perceptions about the profile owner’s personality (higher scores on intelligence and sense of humor), and the profile owner’s attractiveness and participants’ dating intentions. This positive effect of originality on impression formation is further corroborated by the finding that perceived originality did not lead to higher scores on perceptions of the less desired trait oddness. Originality may thus be seen as a positive characteristic of a dating profile, which accords with previous interview studies in which online daters expressed negative attitudes towards dating profiles lacking originality [16,17]. However, as the participants of the present study were older adults who are members of dating platforms on which the textual component on a dating profile plays a prominent role, these results need to be corroborated among younger samples as younger adults are often more inclined to use dating applications with more picture-based dating profiles. It would be interesting to investigate how different dating demographics define and appreciate originality in dating profile texts.

Third, the results of the exploratory content analysis suggest that originality is a multifaceted construct in online dating: perceptions of text originality are affected by choices of form (stylistic features) as well as meaning (self-disclosure statements). This suggests that in addition to a multidimensional construct (i.e., novel and appropriate), originality is manifested through both meaning and form characteristics in dating profiles. Future research should examine how the criteria of novelty and appropriateness on the one hand, and meaning and form on the other hand, relate to each other. For example, stylistic features may be form characteristics that can boost a profile’s novelty, while self-disclosure features may be meaning characteristics that are added to satisfy appropriateness criteria. The latter assumption builds upon an earlier study that suggested that online daters reveal personal information to conform with contextual expectations [24].

Our findings may well extend to other text genres, such as job application letters or consumer-to-consumer advertisements. There, text originality may also be a balancing act between novelty and appropriateness. Moreover, it is also likely that in these and other texts, originality is not only defined by form, but also by certain meaning characteristics that are specific to the context. For example, a consumer-to-consumer advertisement should not only be original in form, but should perhaps also always contain specific product information in order to be perceived as original. Whether these assumptions hold in other contexts though, is up for future studies.

Fourth, this study has shown that it is possible to assess perceived text originality from authentic profile texts based on content analytical features. Our methodological approach offers opportunities for other research aiming to investigate what constitutes originality in texts and how perceived originality affects evaluations. With the features coded in this study, we were able to explain nearly half of the variation in perceived profile text originality scores, and particularly the manually-coded features were important in this. A next challenge would be to examine whether automated measures of the manual-coded features of this study that seemed to indicate perceived text originality, could be developed using natural language processing (NLP) techniques, such as feature extraction and language modeling.

The use of authentic online dating profile texts is thus one of the study’s strengths. At the same time, ethical issues can and should be taken into consideration when using authentic texts. When conducting this study, we had obtained ethical approval of our local REDC, and we made every effort to ensure that sentences and phrases used in our stimuli could not be traced back to the original writers. Nevertheless, a debate has emerged in social sciences recently (e.g., [72]): can people’s online texts be used for scientific analyses, even when these texts are publicly available, if the writers of those texts are not aware of this? There is no simple answer to this, and much depends on the specific online platform and the exact purpose of the study. This is an important consideration for future studies looking into communicative practices in online communicative settings, ranging from BTL reader comments on news sites to online dating.

Bringing Attention to the Eyes Increases First Impressions of Warmth and Competence

More Than Meets the Eyes: Bringing Attention to the Eyes Increases First Impressions of Warmth and Competence. Morgan D. Stosic, Shelby Helwig and Mollie A. Ruben. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, October 19, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1177/01461672221128114

Abstract: The present research examined how face masks alter first impressions of warmth and competence for different racial groups. Participants were randomly assigned to view photographs of White, Black, and Asian targets with or without masks. Across four separate studies (total N = 1,012), masked targets were rated significantly higher in warmth and competence compared with unmasked targets, regardless of their race. However, Asian targets benefited the least from being seen masked compared with Black or White targets. Studies 3 and 4 demonstrate how the positive effect of masks is likely due to these clothing garments re-directing attention toward the eyes of the wearer. Participants viewing faces cropped to the eyes (Study 3), or instructed to gaze into the eyes of faces (Study 4), rated these targets similarly to masked targets, and higher than unmasked targets. Neither political affiliation, belief in mask effectiveness, nor explicit racial prejudice moderated any hypothesized effects.

We instinctively tend toward solutions that consist of adding something rather than subtracting something, even if the subtraction would be superior

Fillon, Adrien A., Fabien Girandola, Nathalie Bonnardel, and Lionel Souchet. 2022. “People Systematically Overlook Subtractive Changes (2021): Replication and Extension.” PsyArXiv. October 18. doi:10.31234/osf.io/4jkvn

Abstract: People systematically overlook subtractive changes and favor additive ones when generating new ideas. In a preregistered experiment conducted via the Prolific platform among French adults (N = 477), we replicated Experiments 2, 3 and 4 in Adams and colleagues (2021)’s study. We replicated the overlooking of subtraction, as participants generated 1155 additive ideas and only 297 subtractive ideas. Cueing participants (“Remember that you can add things or take them away”) increased the percentage who generated at least one subtractive idea (overall OR = 2.52, improvement condition, ϕ = 0.18, make-it-worse condition, ϕ = 0.24).

Results therefore provided empirical support for the overlooking of subtractive changes hypothesis. We also found that norms affected the generation of new ideas (descriptive OR = 7.49, injunctive OR = 6.86). Cues and injunctive (but not descriptive) norms were both related to the asymmetry.

Men do not find the bodies of apparent greater health and fertility the most attractive bodies; the attractiveness is linked to youth and low parity

The picky men: Men's preference for women's body differed among attractiveness, health, and fertility conditions. Chengyang Han et al. Personality and Individual Differences, Volume 201, February 2023, 111921. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2022.111921

Abstract: The health and fertility hypothesis suggests that low body weight young women are healthy and fertile, thereby judged as attractive to men. Although it has been widely accepted, few studies have tested the health and fertility hypothesis on a perceptual level, that is whether the most attractive female body is also perceived as the healthiest and most fertile. In the current study, we investigated young and older men's preferences women's body weight, using 3D human body models. With an interactive body preference task, men chose the BMI and body fat of women's body shapes perceived as most attractive, healthiest and most fertile. The results showed that both young and older men had similar patterns of preferences for women's bodies. For BMI, the most attractive body weight was not seen as the healthiest or the most fertile. Compared to the most attractive BMI, higher BMI was required to be seen as the healthiest and this figure was even higher for fertility judgements. Body fat generally showed similar patterns of results as BMI. Our findings challenge the health and fertility hypothesis and point to the alternative explanation that the judgement of women's attractiveness tracks cues indicating youth and low parity.

Introduction

From an evolutionary perspective, sexual selection should have driven men and women to be attracted to cues that would maximize their reproductive success (Buss, 1988; Symons, 1979). For decades, researchers have found several traits that determine physical attractiveness in women, including Body Mass Index (BMI, weight divided by squared height, kg/m2), waist-to-hip ratio, waist-to-stature ratio, lumbar curvature, and leg length (see Lassek & Gaulin, 2016 for a review). Among all of these cues, BMI is argued to be one of the most crucial determinants of the attractiveness of women, as it plays a critical role in many cultures, especially in industrialized societies. Overall, lower values of BMI are found to be seen as attractive in women, although severe underweight is not attractive (Swami, 2015; Tovée et al., 1999).

It has been widely accepted that the preference for low BMI is adaptive because it indicates higher mate value with respect to health, fertility, fecundity, youthfulness, nulliparity and maternal investment (for a review see Bovet, 2019). One explanation that perhaps gets the most attention is the health and fertility hypothesis. Numerous studies have examined this hypothesis by exploring the relationship between BMI and health indicators (Lassek & Gaulin, 2018a) as well as fertility indicators (Lassek & Gaulin, 2018b). Although there is abundant physiological evidence both in support of and against this relationship (see Lassek and Gaulin, 2018a, Lassek and Gaulin, 2018b for reviews), evidence from the perceptual level is rare. Few studies have tested the perceived attractiveness, health and fertility of female bodies at the same time. Although the perceptual evidence is not mandatory for the hypothesis to be valid, it can provide additional support for or against it.

Singh (1993) published an influential study of female attractiveness claiming that attractive bodily features are indicators of women's fertility and health. Since then, most research in the field of female attractiveness has accepted this argument and built on it (Grammer et al., 2003; Marlowe et al., 2005; Weeden & Sabini, 2005). Not surprisingly, this hypothesis has been extended to low BMI which is assumed to signal optimal health and fertility (Tovée et al., 1999). However, recent evidence has cast doubt on these claims and proposed that the low BMI might serve as cues to nubility and reproductive value (Andrews et al., 2017; Lassek and Gaulin, 2019, Lassek and Gaulin, 2021).

In the past few decades, a great deal of research has investigated the BMI values associated with the most attractive female body. In well-nourished populations, it has been consistently found that the most preferred BMIs are around 18–20 (Crossley et al., 2012; Tovée & Cornelissen, 2001; Wang et al., 2015), which are far below the mean or modal values of typical young women in these populations (Lassek and Gaulin, 2016, Lassek and Gaulin, 2018b). This figure is even lower in East-Asian populations, which are 18.43 in Japanese (Swami et al., 2006) and 17.28 in Malaysian Chinese (Stephen & Perera, 2014).

According to the classification of BMI by WHO, the healthy BMI range is 18.5–24.99, BMI < 18.5 is classified as underweight and BMI >25 is classified as overweight. Abundant evidence from epidemiological studies has shown that overweight status is positively related to a series of cardiovascular diseases like diabetes, hypertension, heart attacks and stroke (Aune et al., 2016; Chen et al., 2013; GBD 2015 Obesity Collaborators, 2017; Khan et al., 2018) and some cancers like endometrial, breast, and colon cancer (Bhaskaran et al., 2014). Complementing these findings, a meta-analysis of over 10 million participants has found that all-cause mortality is lowest in the normal BMI range (20–25), whereas BMIs below (BMI < 20) or above the range (BMI > 25) was positively associated with overall mortality (Di Angelantonio et al., 2016). Similarly, a systematic review suggested that normal weight is associated with longer life expectancy compared to underweight and obese status (Bhaskaran et al., 2018). It should be kept in mind that most evidence suggesting the negative relationship between BMI and health is based on well-nourished populations like North American and Europeans.

In sharp contrast, studies of subsistence and forager groups found that plumpness was preferred in these cultures. Female bodies with a substantially high BMI (e.g., BMI ≥ 25) were judged to be attractive (Boothroyd et al., 2016; Swami et al., 2012; Tovée et al., 2006). This preference is especially strong in environments experiencing food scarcity (Anderson et al., 1992). These cultural variations have been attributed to psychological adaptations to local environments where lower BMI tends to be associated with poor health (Swami, 2015; Tovée et al., 2006).

In fact, evidence from subsistence populations indicates an inverse relationship between BMI and health, where the lowest mortality was found in women with high BMI (e.g. BMI > 25) and women with low BMIs have increased mortality rates (Hanson et al., 1995; Hodge et al., 1996; Sear, 2006; Wang & Hoy, 2002). This negative relationship between BMI and mortality might be due to the increased risks of getting infections in women with low BMI. Evidence from hunter-gatherer groups showed that the majority of female death in these populations was caused by infections in women with low BMIs (Strickland & Ulijaszek, 1993). Even in developed areas where people have access to antibiotics, women with low BMIs are more likely to get infections (Flegal et al., 2007; Milner & Beck, 2012). More recently, researchers found further evidence supporting the inverse relationship between BMI and health in women of reproductive age. Using a large U.S. sample dataset, Lassek and Gaulin (2018a) found that women of reproductive age with BMIs lower than 20 have worse health conditions than women with higher BMIs controlling for other factors that possibly affect health. Specifically, they were more likely to have infections, bed disability days, hospital days and more major disabilities.

To sum up, the existing evidence suggests that BMI does relate to health in many ways, where normal weight might be most protective. However, low BMIs, which are preferred by men in well-nourished populations, are linked to relatively higher mortality rates (Aune et al., 2016; Di Angelantonio et al., 2016) and poor health (Lassek & Gaulin, 2018a), not only in subsistence population but also in well-nourished population. This evidence may chanllenge the health and fertility hypothesis which posits that the preferred BMIs are indicators of good health (Tovée et al., 1999).

It is worth noting that nearly all the aforementioned studies are correlational or cross-sectional, one cannot be sure whether it is low or high BMI directly causes these health issues. Furthermore, one should be careful in interpreting the relationship between BMI and health because BMI conflates fat mass and muscle mass. At a given BMI, the body compositions vary between individuals. For example, people with low fat mass and high muscle mass will be classified as overweight by the BMI classification. Yet, higher fat mass is detrimental to health (Gómez-Ambrosi et al., 2011) while higher muscle mass is associated with enhanced fitness and health (Frankenfield et al., 2001; Johnson et al., 2015).

Perhaps the more relevant effect of BMI on health is its association to fertility health. Evidence from a US national longitudinal research showed that infertility rate is highest in underweight and obese women (Jokela et al., 2008). There is evidence suggesting that obesity is related to polycystic ovarian syndrome, a disease that could cause irregular periods, excess androgen levels and policystic ovaries, which in turn cause infertility problems (Barber et al., 2006; Lim et al., 2013; Vrbikova & Hainer, 2009). Compared to normal weight women, obese women are more likely to have miscarriages whether they conceived naturally or following ovulation induction (Lashen et al., 2004; Metwally et al., 2008). Furthermore, obese women have increased risks of birth defects such as neural tube defects, anencephaly, spina bifida, cardiac septal anomalies l and hydrocephaly (Rasmussen et al., 2008; Stothard et al., 2009).

Nonetheless, low body weight is detrimental to fertility health as well. Indeed, considerable evidence has shown that being underweight adversely affects menstrual function, pregnancy outcomes, perinatal outcomes and neonatal outcomes. To begin with, numerous studies have reported that being underweight, or states of energy deprivation like rapid weight loss and excessive physical activity can lead to menstrual dysfunctions like hypothalamic amenorrhoea, then cause infertility (Frisch, 1987, Frisch, 2004; Stokić et al., 2005; Støving et al., 1999). Women who have low BMI (e.g. BMI <19/20) like athletes and those with eating disorders are more likely to develop amenorrhoea, which is due to endocrine alterations, such as lowered estrogen levels (Ackerman & Misra, 2018; Hamilton-Fairley & Taylor, 2003; Ledger & Skull, 2004; Ziomkiewicz et al., 2008). When putting on weight, resumption of menstrual cycles is observed (Ackerman & Misra, 2018; Arends et al., 2012; Swenne, 2004).

More importantly, pregnancy rates were found to decrease with BMI. One study found that in women with BMI < 21, a one-unit BMI decrease was related to 3 % lower pregnancy rate (Van Der Steeg et al., 2008). Wang et al. (2000) showed that underweight women have a lower chance of getting pregnant with assisted reproduction treatment than women with normal BMI.

Even after conception, women with low BMIs are more likely to have negative pregnancy, perinatal and neonatal outcomes. A meta-analysis including different types of conception indicated that prepregnancy underweight is associated with increased risks of miscarriage (Balsells et al., 2016). Complementing that, a large-scale study with 3854 nulliparous women found that the average duration of pregnancy was shorter in underweight women compared to normal weight women (Hoellen et al., 2014). Consequently, preterm deliveries were significantly more common in underweight women. This gestational age difference was even more evident in extremely underweight women (pre-conceptional BMI < 16). As a result, low birth weight is positively linked to prepregnancy underweight status. Similar results were observed in women undergoing in vitro fertilization. Compared to normal weight women, implantation, clinical pregnancy, and ongoing pregnancy rates were lower in underweight women (Tang et al., 2021).

Despite the close relationship between weight and fertility, BMI may not be as closely related to fertility as body fat percentage (BF). Evidence has shown that a certain amount of BF is necessary for maintaining reproductive function. For example, Frisch, 1987, Frisch, 2004 stated that 22 % BF is necessary to maintain normal periods, get pregnant, and lactate. On the contrary, women who have very low BF like female athletes were found to be more likely to experience fertility-related problems like amenorrhoea, anovulation, irregular menstrual cycles, and delayed menarche compared to women with normal BF levels (Klentrou & Plyley, 2003; Redman & Loucks, 2005; Torstveit & Sundgot-Borgen, 2005; Zanker, 2006). In addition, studies have shown that poor nutrition which possibly relates to low BF is linked to delayed menarche (Gluckman & Hanson, 2006; Thomas et al., 2001). In other words, the reproductive span is shorter in women with low BF levels compared to women with normal BF levels.

One study that included healthy reproductive-aged women found that women with very low BF (<22 %) have lower levels of estradiol compared with women with average levels of BF (Ziomkiewicz et al., 2008). Additionally, this study found that a 10 % increase in BF was associated with an increase in estradiol levels. Estradiol plays a critical role in reproductive functions. Lower levels of estradiol decrease pregnancy rates both in healthy naturally conceiving women (Lu et al., 1999; Venners et al., 2006) and in women undergoing in vitro fertilization (Blazar et al., 2004; Chen et al., 2003). Consequently, low BF adversely affects fertility health.

The studies cited above mainly focused on the relationship between BMI and physical health as well as fertility health. Only few studies investigated these relationships from a perceptual perspective, which is how women's body weight affects their perceived health and fertility. Furthermore, to our knowledge, no study has examined the relationship between women's BF and their perceived health and perceived fertility. As noted above, BF might be more important to women's fertility than BMI. Hence, the current study aimed to test the health and fertility hypothesis from a perceptual perspective. Using 3D female body models with varying BMI and BF levels, we attempted to investigate men's preference for women's bodies in three dimensions: the BMI and BF levels found most attractive, the BMI and BF levels perceived to be healthiest, and the BMI and BF levels perceived to be most fertile. The evidence cited above may not support the widespread assumption that men prefer low BMI in female bodies because it indicates better health and fertility. Hence, here we predict that men will choose lower BMI and BF when optimizing attractiveness, than when optimizing the healthy and fertile appearance of women's bodies.

In addition, we also attempted to explore the age effect on body weight preferences under attractiveness, health, and fertility conditions. Previous studies showed mixed results regarding the age effect on the preferences of women's BMI. For example, Sorokowski et al. (2014) found older men preferred higher BMI of women's body than young men do, whereas George et al. (2008) found no effects of age on attractiveness preferences of BMI of women's body. In the literature, older men are generally less picky than younger men when judging women's facial attractiveness (Han et al., 2022; Marcinkowska et al., 2017), which may also present in body weight preferences. Moreover, social media plays an important role in shaping individual's perception of attractiveness, especially the most attractive body weight (Grabe et al., 2008; Swami, 2015). Young adults use social media more than older adults (Sharifian et al., 2021, also see surveys of U.S. adults present by Pew Research Center, 2021). One recent study showed that higher social media use was associated with more negative effects in young adults, but not in older adults (Sharifian et al., 2021). This may indicate that young adults are more influenced by social media than older adults. Slim bodies are frequently exposed in social media. Therefore, we predict that younger men will show stronger preferences for lower BMI and BF of women's body than older men.

Long Social Distancing: More than 10pct of Americans with recent work experience say they will continue social distancing after the COVID-19 pandemic ends, and another 45 pct will do so in limited ways

Long Social Distancing. Jose Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom & Steven J. Davis. NBER Working Paper 30568. October 2022. DOI 10.3386/w30568

Abstract: More than ten percent of Americans with recent work experience say they will continue social distancing after the COVID-19 pandemic ends, and another 45 percent will do so in limited ways. We uncover this Long Social Distancing phenomenon in our monthly Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes. It is more common among older persons, women, the less educated, those who earn less, and in occupations and industries that require many face-to-face encounters. People who intend to continue social distancing have lower labor force participation – unconditionally, and conditional on demographics and other controls. Regression models that relate outcomes to intentions imply that Long Social Distancing reduced participation by 2.5 percentage points in the first half of 2022. Separate self-assessed causal effects imply a reduction of 2.0 percentage points. The impact on the earnings-weighted participation rate is smaller at about 1.4 percentage points. This drag on participation reduces potential output by nearly one percent and shrinks the college wage premium. Economic reasoning and evidence suggest that Long Social Distancing and its effects will persist for many months or years.

Adaptation to taxation: Corporate income tax changes generate persistent effects on R&D expenditure, productivity and output whereas personal income tax changes trigger large but short-lived responses on the same

Short-Term Tax Cuts, Long-Term Stimulus. James Cloyne, Joseba Martinez, Haroon Mumtaz & Paolo Surico. NBER Working Paper 30246. July 2022. DOI 10.3386/w30246

Abstract: We study the persistent effects of temporary changes in U.S. federal corporate and personal income tax rates using a narrative identification approach. A corporate income tax cut leads to a sustained increase in GDP and productivity, with peak effects between five and eight years. R&D spending and capital investment display hump-shaped responses while hours worked and employment are much less affected. In contrast, personal income tax cuts trigger a short-lived boost to GDP, productivity and hours worked but have no long-term effects. We develop and estimate an endogenous growth model with variable factor utilization and show that these features generate a pro-cyclical response of productivity which is key to account for our empirical findings.

8 Conclusions

Do transitory changes in corporate and personal income taxes have persistent effects on output? And what are the channels? We answer the first question using local projections and narrative-identified tax shocks on post-WWII U.S. data. We answer the second question by running counterfactual simulations from an estimated structural model with endogenous growth, variable factor utilization and distortionary taxes.

Our main findings are that corporate income tax changes generate persistent effects on R&D expenditure, productivity and output whereas personal income tax changes trigger large but short-lived responses of capital expenditure, productivity and output. We show that matching the pro-cyclical response of productivity in the short-run and in the long-run is crucial for the ability of the estimated model to account for the dynamic effects of the two tax shocks on economic activity. Variable labor utilization appears important for replicating the short-term response of productivity and output to a personal income tax change, while R&D expenditure and technological adoption are key to account for the long-term effects of corporate income tax changes.

Female birds disguised as males get extra meals: Around 20% of female hummingbirds have plumage that is characteristic of the males of the species, & this increases access to food resources through mimicry of more aggressive males

Intersexual social dominance mimicry drives female hummingbird polymorphism. Jay J. Falk, Dustin R. Rubenstein, Alejandro Rico-Guevara and Michael S. Webster. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, September 7 2022. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2022.0332

Abstract: Female-limited polymorphisms, where females have multiple forms but males have only one, have been described in a variety of animals, yet are difficult to explain because selection typically is expected to decrease rather than maintain diversity. In the white-necked jacobin (Florisuga mellivora), all males and approximately 20% of females express an ornamented plumage type (androchromic), while other females are non-ornamented (heterochromic). Androchrome females benefit from reduced social harassment, but it remains unclear why both morphs persist. Female morphs may represent balanced alternative behavioural strategies, but an alternative hypothesis is that androchrome females are mimicking males. Here, we test a critical prediction of these hypotheses by measuring morphological, physiological and behavioural traits that relate to resource-holding potential (RHP), or competitive ability. In all these traits, we find little difference between female types, but higher RHP in males. These results, together with previous findings in this species, indicate that androchrome females increase access to food resources through mimicry of more aggressive males. Importantly, the mimicry hypothesis provides a clear theoretical pathway for polymorphism maintenance through frequency-dependent selection. Social dominance mimicry, long suspected to operate between species, can therefore also operate within species, leading to polymorphism and perhaps similarities between sexes more generally.

Electronic supplementary material is available online at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.c.6166889.

Results revealed significant negative correlations between mindfulness and neuroticism, & trait anxiety, & positive correlation with conscientiousness, but no significant relationship with intelligence

A Meta-Analysis of Trait Mindfulness: Relationships with the Big Five Personality Traits, Intelligence, and Anxiety. Justin T. Banfi, Jason G. Randall. Journal of Research in Personality, October 12 2022, 104307. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2022.104307

Abstract: The purpose of this meta-analysis is to evaluate the correlates of trait mindfulness—the tendency to pay attention to the present moment, in a non-judgmental manner—with other individual differences to establish construct validity. We update and expand previous meta-analyses of trait mindfulness with Big Five personality and anxiety with larger samples, unique relationships with broad measures of intelligence, novel moderators, and relative weights analysis. In total, 73,752 participants' data distributed amongst 280 effects were analyzed. Results revealed significant correlations between mindfulness and all personality variables examined, with the strongest effects for neuroticism (ρ = -.53), trait anxiety (ρ = -.50), and conscientiousness (ρ = .42), but no significant relationship with intelligence. Altogether, Big Five variables explained 44% of the variance in trait mindfulness, with neuroticism and conscientiousness demonstrating the strongest influence. These results identify mindfulness as a unique, non-cognitive trait. Moderation analyses revealed negligible effects of sample characteristics (sex, race, age, student status). The scale used to measure mindfulness had a limited influence as well, moderating the correlation between mindfulness and openness alone. Overall, these results provide a clearer picture of the personality profile of mindful individuals and inform meaningful conceptual differences between these constructs.

Non-news Websites Expose People to More Political Content Than News Websites: Evidence from Browsing Data in Three Countries

Wojcieszak, Magdalena, Ericka Menchen-Trevino, Bernhard Clemm von Hohenberg, Sjifra E. de Leeuw, João Gonçalves, Samuel Davidson, and Alexandre Gonçalves. 2022. “Non-news Websites Expose People to More Political Content Than News Websites: Evidence from Browsing Data in Three Countries.” OSF Preprints. October 13. doi:10.31219/osf.io/8et9g

Abstract: Most scholars focus on the prevalence and democratic effects of (partisan) news exposure. This focus misses large parts of online activities of a majority of politically disinterested citizens. Although political content also appears outside of news outlets and may profoundly shape public opinion, its prevalence and effects are under-studied at scale. This project combines three-wave panel survey data from three countries (total N = 6,892) with online behavioral data from the same participants (119.7M visits). We create a multi-lingual classifier to identify political content both in news and outside (e.g. in shopping or entertainment sites). We find that news consumption is infrequent: just 3.4% of participants’ online browsing comprised visits to news sites. Only between 14% (NL) and 36% (US) of these visits were to hard news. The overwhelming majority of participants' visits were to non-news sites. Although only 1.6% of those visits related to politics, in absolute terms, citizens encounter politics more frequently outside of news than within news. Out of every 10 visits to political content, 3 come from news and 7 from non-news sites. Furthermore, non-news exposure to political content had the same – and in some cases stronger - associations with key democratic attitudes and behaviors as news exposure. These findings offer a comprehensive analysis of the online political (not solely news) ecosystem and demonstrate the importance of assessing the prevalence and effects of political content in non-news sources.

Ordinary people too harbor the vision of an utopia or "ideal" society; incorporating science into one's utopia is clearly a minus, except in China, where pro-environmental attitudes are not opposite to science

Profiles of an Ideal Society: The Utopian Visions of Ordinary People. Julian W. Fernando et al. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, Oct 13 2022. https://doi.org/10.1177/00220221221126419

Abstract: Throughout history, people have expressed the desire for an ideal society—a utopia. These imagined societies have motivated action for social change. Recent research has demonstrated this motivational effect among ordinary people in English-speaking countries, but we know little about the specific content of ordinary people’s utopian visions in different cultures. Here we report that a majority of samples from four countries—Australia, China, the United Kingdom, and the United States—converge on a small number of utopian visions: a Modern Green utopia, a Primitivist utopia, a Futurist utopia, and a Religious utopia. Although the prevalence of these utopia profiles differed across countries, there was a cross-cultural convergence in utopian visions. These shared visions may provide common ground for conversations about how to achieve a better future across cultural borders.

We believe that it would benefit ourselves more than others if we succeeded in becoming a better person

Sun, Jessie, Joshua A. Wilt, Peter Meindl, Hanne M. Watkins, and Geoffrey Goodwin. 2022. “How and Why People Want to Be More Moral.” PsyArXiv. October 13. doi:10.31234/osf.io/6smzh

Abstract: What types of moral improvements do people wish to make? Do they hope to become more good, or less bad? Do they wish to be more caring? More honest? More loyal? And why exactly do they want to become more moral? Presumably, most people want to improve their morality because this would benefit others, but is this in fact their primary motivation? Here, we begin to investigate these questions. Across two large, preregistered studies (N = 1,818), participants provided open-ended descriptions of one change they could make in order to become more moral; they then reported their beliefs about and motives for this change. In both studies, people most frequently expressed desires to improve their compassion and more often framed their moral improvement goals in terms of amplifying good behaviors than curbing bad ones. The strongest predictor of moral motivation was the extent to which people believed that making the change would have positive consequences for their own well-being. Together, these studies provide rich descriptive insights into how ordinary people want to be more moral, and show that they are particularly motivated to do so for their own sake.

Irrespective of their therapeutic orientation, psychotherapists overestimated the proportion of patients recovering or improving, & and underestimated the proportion of patients not changing or deteriorating

Attitudes of psychotherapists towards their own performance and the role of the social comparison group: The self-assessment bias in psychodynamic, humanistic, systemic, and behavioral therapists. Thomas Probst, Elke Humer, Andrea Jesser and Christoph Pieh. Front. Psychol., October 13 2022. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.966947

Abstract: Studies report that psychotherapists overestimate their own performance (self-assessment bias). This study aimed to examine if the self-assessment bias in psychotherapists differs between therapeutic orientations and/or between social comparison groups. Psychotherapists gave subjective estimations of their professional performance (0–100 scale from poorest to best performance) compared to two social comparison groups (“all psychotherapists” vs. “psychotherapists with the same therapeutic approach”). They further rated the proportion of their patients recovering, improving, not changing, or deteriorating. In total, N = 229 Austrian psychotherapists (n = 39 psychodynamic, n = 121 humanistic, n = 48 systemic, n = 21 behavioral) participated in the online survey. Psychotherapists rated their own performance on average at M = 79.11 relative to “all psychotherapists” vs. at M = 77.76 relative to “psychotherapists with the same therapeutic approach” (p < 0.05). This was not significantly different between therapeutic orientations. A significant interaction between social comparison group and therapeutic orientation (p < 0.05) revealed a drop of self-assessement bias in social comparison group “same approach” vs. “all psychotherapists” in psychodynamic and humanistic therapists (p < 0.05). Psychotherapists overestimated the proportion of patients recovering (M = 44.76%), improving (M = 43.73%) and underestimated the proportion of patients not changing (M = 9.86%) and deteriorating (M = 1.64%), with no differences between orientations. The self-assessment bias did not differ between therapeutic orientations, but the social comparison group appears to be an important variable. A major drawback is that results have not been connected to patient-reported outcome or objectively rated performance parameters.

When asked at what income level one is "rich," even the wealthiest state a higher figure than they themselves earn; they tink they belong to the middle class

The psychology of income wealth threshold estimations: A registered report. Robin Rinn, Anand Krishna, Roland Deutsch. British Journal of Social Psychology, October 11 2022. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjso.12581

Abstract: How do people estimate the income that is needed to be rich? Two correlative survey studies (Study 1 and 2, N = 568) and one registered experimental study (Study 3, N = 500) examined the cognitive mechanisms that are used to derive an answer to this question. We tested whether individuals use their personal income (PI) as a self-generated anchor to derive an estimate of the income needed to be rich (= income wealth threshold estimation, IWTE). On a bivariate level, we found the expected positive relationship between one's PI and IWTE and, in line with previous findings, we found that people do not consider themselves rich. Furthermore, we predicted that individuals additionally use information about their social status within their social circles to make an IWTE. The findings from study 2 support this notion and show that only self-reported high-income individuals show different IWTEs depending on relative social status: Individuals in this group who self-reported a high status produced higher IWTEs than individuals who self-reported low status. The registered experimental study could not replicate this pattern robustly, although the results trended non-significantly in the same direction. Together, the findings revealed that the income of individuals as well as the social environment are used as sources of information to make IWTE judgements, although they are likely not the only important predictors.

Does Economic Growth Meaningfully Improve Well-being? An Optimistic Re-Analysis of Easterlin’s Research

Does Economic Growth Meaningfully Improve Well-being? An Optimistic Re-Analysis of Easterlin’s Research: Founders Pledge. Vadim Albinsky. Effective Altruism Forum, Sep 2022. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/coryFCkmcMKdJb7Pz/does-economic-growth-meaningfully-improve-well-being-an

Summary

Understanding the relationship between wellbeing and economic growth is a topic that is of key importance to Effective Altruism (e.g. see Hillebrandt and Hallstead, Clare and Goth). In particular, a key disagreement regards the Easterlin Paradox; the finding that happiness[1] varies with income across countries and between individuals, but does not seem to vary significantly with a country’s income as it changes over time. Michael Plant recently wrote an excellent post summarizing this research. He ends up mostly agreeing with Richard Easterlin’s latest paper arguing that the Easterlin Paradox still holds; suggesting that we should look to approaches other than economic growth to boost happiness. I agree with Michael Plant that life satisfaction is a valid and reliable measure, that it should be a key goal of policy and philanthropy, and that boosting income does not increase it as much as we might naively expect. In fact, we at Founders Pledge highly value and regularly use Michael Plant’s and Happier Lives Institute’s (HLI) research; and we believe income is only a small part of what interventions should aim at. However, my interpretation of the practical implications of Easterlin’s research differ from Easterlin’s in three ways which I argue in this post:

-  Easterlin finds small coefficients in his preferred regressions of changes in countries’ happiness on changes in GDP. He concludes that these coefficients have low “economic significance” and that increasing economic growth is not a good way to make people happier. However, even if we take these coefficients at face value, they still represent a very meaningful increase in wellbeing within the effective altruism framework, consistent with the impacts of unconditional cash transfers on individuals. The benefits become very large when aggregated across all the people in a country for many years.

-  We also have reason to doubt Easterlin’s results, in that they are highly sensitive to small changes in methodology. We perform two variations on his regression that fully accept his methodology of only including “full cycle” countries, but update it slightly, reversing the result. If we replicate his results counting one more country as a “transition” economy, the Easterlin paradox largely disappears. If we repeat his analysis with new data from 2020 instead of 2019, the paradox also seems to largely disappear.

-  It may be difficult to find things we can influence whose change over time will have a higher correlation to a country’s change in happiness than changes in GDP. Even if we accept that boosting GDP does not meaningfully increase happiness, other potential means of boosting national happiness may increase it even less. If we rerun Easterlin’s analysis using three interventions Easterlin and Plant suggest (health, pollution, and a comprehensive welfare state), their implied impacts on national happiness are much smaller than the impacts for GDP or negative. However, I have low confidence in this conclusion, and think it is a very valuable project to identify the interventions that are most likely to have an impact on happiness.

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3. The happiness impact of alternative interventions is smaller than the impact of GDP.

Easterlin concludes his latest paper by suggesting that even though he does not believe that GDP growth has a meaningful impact on happiness, that there are a number of better interventions. Michael Plant adds some suggestions to the list in his post, coming up with a set of potential interventions that includes:

“...job security, a comprehensive welfare state, getting citizens to be healthy, and encouraging long-term relationships…[taking] mental health and palliative care more seriously…improved air quality, reduced noise, more green and blue space (blue spaces being water), and getting people to commute smaller distances (Diener et al. 2019). Social interactions could be enhanced via urban design, reducing corruption, increasing transparency, supporting healthy family relationships, and maybe even things like progressive taxation.”

All of these sound like promising ideas, and are a good research agenda for future investigation. However, it may be difficult to find one of these measures that has a higher impact on country-level happiness than GDP using Easterlin’s methodology. To perform an exploratory analysis, I start with Easterlin’s data from his “best possible life” regression (taking his relatively low estimated impacts at face value as I do in section 1.) I then choose three interventions from Michael Plant’s list that seem to have a fair amount of annual data available on OurWorldInData.org: health, pollution and a comprehensive welfare state.[7] I replace annual GDP growth in Easterlin’s regression with annual growth on these three metrics, and perform a separate analysis for each one.[8] Each regression looks at annualized changes in a country’s Cantril ladders scores versus annualized changes in the specified metric for the past 12-14 years. The health regression estimates how much a decrease in the number of years people in a country lose to ill health corresponds to increases in happiness. This regression produces coefficients that are either an order of magnitude smaller than the GDP regression, or negative, depending on whether we exclude countries that have less than 12 years of data. In both cases the r-squared of the regression is essentially 0.. There does not appear to be a way to interpret these results to suggest that changes in health have a higher impact on national happiness than changes in GDP. The pollution regression repeats the methodology for health, but looks at only the changes in the years of life lost to pollution. This analysis actually shows negative results of a magnitude similar to the positive results of the GDP regression. This would imply that increases in pollution are actually associated with countries getting happier. For example, the Republic of Congo and Benin both had large annual increases in happiness despite increasing levels of pollution.[9] The comprehensive welfare state regression examines the impact of changes in a score of whether a country has an adequate safety net. This analysis also shows negative results, however there are very few countries and years for which this data is available and the data appears to be of low quality, suggesting that we should not read too much into this result. In all three of these analyses we do not find any evidence consistent with any of these metrics having a higher impact on national happiness than changes in GDP.

I do not have a high level of confidence in these initial results. There are likely better sources of data, and better methodologies to employ. However, I do think they suggest that it may be difficult to find any interventions of their kind which will imply a larger impact on happiness than GDP using Easterlin’s methodology.

Normies do not experience "duping delight," the triumph of successful lying, but individuals with dark personality traits seem to enjoy it

In Search of Duping Delight. Christopher A. Gunderson et al. Affective Science (2022) 3:519–527. July 19 2022. https://link.springer.com/epdf/10.1007/s42761-022-00126-5?sharing_token=UDARajZZMOajsQOWajroRPe4RwlQNchNByi7wbcMAY4DvTiS0pewgUgjHUGHF-j8tun13uPLn0O4pzl2ZLfzKIaL7mGS7mgTPcoOOvxPoS0cEJiQ_KVmG43HkaTQYNUo9ipPDnldxhCSzE8HYHFl9lbBaLFNHzToXmNnToT9Jgg%3D

Abstract: Deception has long been assumed to conjure diverse affective experiences (Trovillo, 1938). Liars, more than truth-tellers, are theorized to feel guilt, fear, and nervousness (e.g., Ekman, 1985; Zuckerman et al., 1981). Additionally, deception has been proposed to elicit positive affect. Ekman (1985) broadly defined duping delight as any positive affective experience that occurs in anticipation of, during, or following a lie. Empirical evidence for this definition of duping delight has primarily come from studies of affective cues during deceptive acts. For example, in a study of emotional, high-stakes lies in which people pleaded for help to find a person they had recently murdered, smiles were described by ten Brinke and Porter (2012) as a sign of duping delight. However, research suggests that smiles may occur for multiple reasons (e.g., to signal affiliation or dominance; Martin et al., 2017). Given the difficulty in inferring affective states from facial expressions (Barrett et al., 2019), a more direct approach would ask liars and truth-tellers to report on their affect.

Discussion

In the two studies, we sought experimental evidence that successful deception would result in duping delight. Across both studies, receiving affirming feedback about one’s believability increased positive affect. Believability feedback, however, did not interact with veracity to predict positive affect: Successful (vs. unsuccessful) liars did not report greater positive affect. However, we did find that liars who reported moderate and high (but not low) Machiavellianism and narcissism reported more positive affect after receiving affirming feedback, suggesting that personality variables may be an important predictor of who experiences duping delight. Although these findings suggest that duping delight may be a less common response to successful deception than previously theorized, it should be noted that Ekman and Frank (1993) proposed additional conditions for producing duping delight that were not part of our paradigm. While our paradigm involved a lie that caused no harm to others (Ruedy et al., 2013), the present study lacked an audience to witness the lie and a “victim” who has a reputation of being hard to trick (Ekman & Frank, 1993). That said, we did directly test one potential moderator of the experience of duping delight in Study 2, specifically whether the lie was goal conducive. We attempted to manipulate goal congruence by including an incentive condition, which provided a tangible reward for successful lying (or truth-telling). However, we found no effect of incentive. Although these findings may suggest that our incentive was not large enough to impact affective experiences, these results are consistent with previous research on conceptually similar cheating behavior: positive affect is elicited whether cheating is self-selected or sanctioned by experimental manipulation and was unrelated to the size of financial incentive gained by cheating (Ruedy et al., 2013). Alternatively, it is possible that duping delight is only experienced by a subset of the population. For example, individuals with high levels of “dark” personality traits have been observed to lie more and report duping delight as a motivator for their deception (Jonason et al., 2014; Spidel et al., 2011). Indeed, duping delight might serve as positive reinforcement for these individuals, resulting in their prolific use of deception. The results in Study 2 indicate that Machiavellianism and narcissism moderated the effect of positive affect after receiving believable (vs. not believable) feedback after lying. This is consistent with previous work suggesting that “dark” personality traits are positively associated with lying and unethical behavior across various situations (Azizli et al., 2016; Baughman et al., 2014; Elaad et al., 2020) and positive attitudes about deceptive communication (Oliveira & Levine, 2008). Future research should continue to explore the effects of personality and situational variables (e.g., Markowitz & Levine, 2021) with consideration for a typology of lies (Cantarero et al., 2018) that may elicit different affective experiences while lying. To date, much of the research on duping delight in the deception literature has been focused on how this affective experience might give rise to behavioral cues to deception (e.g., Ekman, 1985; ten Brinke & Porter, 2012). The current research advances theorizing about duping delight by testing some of the proposed moderators of this experience and considering how this affective experience may reinforce and exacerbate the use of deception in social life. Additional research on duping delight will allow for a richer understanding of how and why people choose to lie, and whether this affective experience acts as an affective “reward” that affects deception frequency over time.

The association between "cheaper" non-marital sex partners and marriage rates is temporary: recent sex partners predict lower odds of marriage, but not lifetime non-marital sex partners; it is not "the" reason for declining marriage rates

Does a longer sexual resume affect marriage rates? Nicholas H. Wolfinger, Samuel L. Perry. Social Science Research, October 11 2022, 102800. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssresearch.2022.102800

Abstract: Sociologists have proposed numerous theories for declining marriage rates in the United States, often highlighting demographic, economic, and cultural factors. One controversial theory contends that having multiple non-marital sex partners reduces traditional incentives for men to get married and simultaneously undermines their prospects in the marriage market. For women, multiple partners purportedly reduces their desirability as spouses by evoking a gendered double-standard about promiscuity. Though previous studies have shown that having multiple premarital sex partners is negatively associated with marital quality and stability, to date no research has examined whether having multiple non-marital sex partners affects marriage rates. Data from four waves of the National Survey of Family Growth reveal that American women who report more sex partners are less likely to get married by the time of the survey (though so too were virgins). Yet this finding is potentially misleading given the retrospective and cross-sectional nature of the data. Seventeen waves of prospective data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth's 1997 mixed-gender cohort that extend through 2015 show the association between non-marital sex partners and marriage rates is temporary: recent sex partners predict lower odds of marriage, but not lifetime non-marital sex partners. Seemingly unrelated bivariate probit models suggest the short-term association likely reflects a causal effect. Our findings ultimately cast doubt on recent scholarship that has implicated the ready availability of casual sex in the retreat from marriage. Rather, the effect of multiple sex partners on marriage rates is “seasonal” for most Americans.

Introduction

As more Americans choose to delay marriage or forego it altogether (Bloome and Ang, 2020), sociologists have offered a number of explanations. These have included the falling economic prospects of men and the stronger economic prospects of women, which weakened the latter's incentives; rising expectations of consumption for the middle class; the growing cultural value of achieving economic stability before marriage; and creeping disenchantment with the idea of life-long commitment (Carr and Utz, 2020; Cherlin, 2020; Edin and Kefalas, 2011; England, 2018; Kuperberg, 2019; Schneider et al., 2018; Smock et al., 2005). A more controversial theory for declining marriage rates is the idea that the broad acceptance and availability of non-marital sexual activity (and, to a lesser extent, masturbatory pornography use) has made marriage less necessary or even desirable (Caldwell, 2020; Regnerus, 2017; Regnerus and Uecker, 2011; for critiques, see Bridges et al., 2018; Perry, 2020; Risman, 2019).1

To be sure, scholars who support the latter theory acknowledge that the vast majority of people who marry do so for non-sexual reasons, since most couples have sex before marriage. Nonetheless, in a world where one can have casual sex with little to no commitment, the argument goes that some men and women will simply have one less traditional incentive to get married, as well as less incentive to become the kind of person who is “marriage material” (as evidenced either by superior economic prospects or chaste reputation) (Baumeister and Vohs, 2012; Buss and Schmitt, 2011; Caldwell, 2020; Huang et al., 2011; Malcolm and Naufal, 2016; Regnerus, 2017, 2019; Regnerus and Uecker, 2011).

Though this theory rests upon debatable premises (e.g., gendered assumptions about desire for sexual activity, the extent to which people exchange long-term commitments for sexual activity or vice versa, the consistent coupling of sex and marriage), the broad empirical claim itself has yet to be definitively examined. Specifically, is there evidence that never-married persons with multiple sex partners (indicating they not only can, but do more readily access sexual activity with less long-term commitment) are less likely to get married? Despite decades of references to this idea, no study has tried to test it using representative data. This neglect is especially curious given that the theory is consistent with pervasive cultural tropes arguing why young women in particular need to withhold sex: frequent sex partners purportedly render women less desirable, and, if men could get sex without commitment, they might be less motivated to marry and less motivated to develop their prospects to establish their eligibility for marriage—in other words, the “why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free” theory (Baumeister and Vohs, 2012; Huang et al., 2011; Regnerus, 2017; Regnerus and Uecker, 2011).

Addressing this gap in the literature, we draw on data from both the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG) and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY97) to assess how the number of Americans’ non-marital sex partners predicts their likelihood of marrying. Using cross-sectional data from the NSFG, our preliminary findings suggest that never-married women who recount more sex partners (as well as those with no sex partners) are less likely to get married by the time of the survey. The NSFG is limited in several ways—repeated cross-sectional data, sexual history only available for women, retrospective measure of the number of sex partners—so we turn to the NLSY97 and its 17 waves of prospective data extending from 1997 to 2015. We find that the recent number of sex partners is associated with a reduction in the odds of marriage, but lifetime sex partners is not, indicating the link between more sex partners and likelihood of marriage is temporary. Seeking to disentangle self-selection versus “treatment” effects, seemingly unrelated bivariate probit models suggest that the short-term effect is likely causal. We propose that the effect of multiple sex partners on the likelihood of marriage is seasonal, reflecting a period where the persons are enjoying sexual activity with less commitment. Yet having multiple sex partners does not seem to discernibly influence their odds of marriage in the long run.

Our findings extend sociologists' understanding of the link between non-marital sexual activity and marriage in several ways. First and foremost, our findings cast doubt on the controversial notion that more readily available sexual activity with numerous partners will reduce men's and women's desire or desirability, and ultimately, likelihood of marrying. Though the “seasonal” effect of having multiple sex partners may contribute to delayed marriage, declining rates of marriage cannot be broadly explained by access to “cheap sex,” especially in light of the fact that sex frequency and the number of sex partners is declining among young people (Lei and South, 2021; Twenge et al., 2017). Our study also shows that the sexual activity of single women does not appear to make them “undesirable” as marriage partners. Although heterosexual women have historically been stigmatized for having casual sex (Allison and Risman, 2014; Armstrong et al., 2012; England and Bearak, 2014), our analyses suggest that this does not manifest itself in long-term singleness. Women with multiple sex partners are just as likely to get married as are virgins, if somewhat later. Our findings ultimately underscore the continued decoupling of sexual history from marriage rates per se (D'Emilio and Freedman, 2012), instead highlighting how seasons of sexual exploration with different partners may simply contribute to postponing a relationship most Americans still anticipate and, ultimately, form (Newport and Wilke 2013; Parker and Stepler, 2017).