Buying well‐being: Spending behavior and happiness

Buying well‐being: Spending behavior and happiness. Lara B. Aknin, Dylan Wiwad, Katherine B. Hanniball. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, https://doi.org/10.1111/spc3.12386

Abstract: The relationship between money and happiness is complex. While a large literature demonstrates a small but significant positive association between overall income and well‐being, a relatively new area of research explores the emotional consequences of everyday spending choices. Here we review this recent but rapidly growing area of investigation. We begin by briefly summarizing the link between money and happiness. Then, through the lens of 2 dominant models of human happiness, we suggest that seemingly inconsequential spending choices may provide an underappreciated and underutilized route to greater well‐being. Finally, we review new empirical evidence demonstrating that individuals can use their disposable income to increase their happiness by investing in experiential (rather than material) purchases, more free time, routine, self‐expression, and generosity.

Participants’ romantic attraction, likelihood of selecting, and subsequent interpersonal outcomes with a dating partner almost exclusively depended on their perception of their dating partner’s mate value: the higher, the better. There was no evidence for the popular matching hypothesis

Wurst, Stefanie N., Sarah Humberg, and Mitja Back 2018. “Preprint of "the Impact of Mate Value in First and Subsequent Real-life Romantic Encounters"”. Open Science Framework. February 1. doi:10.17605/OSF.IO/ADEJ3

Abstract: We provide a first systematic investigation of the most prominent hypotheses about the impact of mate value on interpersonal attraction in real-life early-stage romantic encounters. Using Response Surface Analysis, we simultaneously examined how (a) people’s perception of their own mate value, (b) their perception of a potential partner’s mate value, and (c) the interplay between the two mate values impact initial romantic attraction and selection as well as subsequent interpersonal outcomes after selection. Data came from the “Date me for Science” speed-dating study (n = 398), in which participants who mutually selected each other at the speed-dating event were followed up with 3 assessments in the 6 weeks after the event to assess subsequent outcomes. Participants’ romantic attraction, likelihood of selecting, and subsequent interpersonal outcomes with a dating partner almost exclusively depended on their perception of their dating partner’s mate value: the higher, the better. There was no evidence for the popular matching hypothesis, which states that people feel attracted to and select dating partners whom they perceive to have a mate value similar to their own. Implications of these findings for theory and research on the impact of mate value on romantic attraction and selection are discussed.

Participants reported lower need satisfaction and being more out of the loop after viewing unfamiliar, compared to familiar, musicians, celebrities and brand logos

Iannone, N. E., Kelly, J. R., & Williams, K. D. (2018). “Who’s that?”: The negative consequences of being out of the loop on pop culture. Psychology of Popular Media Culture, 7(2), 113-129. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/ppm0000120

Abstract: Being out of the loop is a form of partial ostracism in which one is excluded from a domain of information known by others. We investigate whether being out of the loop on a specific domain of information—pop culture—will lead to negative outcomes associated with more complete forms of ostracism. Participants reported lower need satisfaction and being more out of the loop after viewing unfamiliar, compared to familiar, musicians (Study 1) and celebrities (Study 2). Study 3 assessed a different form of pop culture stimuli—brand logos—and found the same results. Finally, Study 4 utilized an alternative method where participants were exposed to a variety of pop culture stimuli (e.g., movies, books, singers) and also included a non-pop culture-related control condition. Participants in the unfamiliar condition reported lower need satisfaction and feeling more out of the loop than participants in the familiar and control conditions. Across all 4 studies, feeling more out of the loop mediated the relationship between familiarity and need satisfaction level. Additionally, participants’ self-rated pop culture importance did not moderate the effect. Thus, seemingly innocuous reminders of being out of the cultural loop in everyday life are capable of eliciting negative psychological consequences.

A female fish that today doesn't need males to clone itself copulates with other species' males to stimulate embryonic development. Those males do that probably because the interactions of a sexual male and the female are observed by conspecific females and make that male more attractive

Male mate choice in Livebearing fishes: an overview. Ingo Schlupp. Current Zoology, zoy028, https://doi.org/10.1093/cz/zoy028

Abstract: Although the majority of studies on mate choice focus on female mate choice, there is growing recognition of the role of male mate choice, too. Male mate choice is tightly linked to two other phenomena, female competition for males, and ornamentation in females. In the current paper I review the existing literature on this in a group of fishes, Poeciliidae. In this group male mate choice appears to be based on differences in female quality, especially female size, which is a proxy for fecundity. Some males also have to choose between heterospecific and conspecific females in the unusual mating system of the Amazon molly. In this case, they typically show a preference for conspecific females. While male mate choice is relatively well documented for this family, female ornamentation and female competition are not.

Keywords: fecundity, sexual selection, female choice, Poecilia, Xiphophorus, Gambusia, guppy, binary choice test, preference function, female size

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Amazon mollies are an all-female, clonal species of fish of hybrid origin (Hubbs & Hubbs 1932, Schlupp & Riesch 2011). The maternal ancestor is the Atlantic molly P. mexicana and the paternal ancestor is the sailfin molly P. latipinna. The single, original hybridization apparently took place about 100.000 generations ago in an area near present-day Tampico [...]. Amazon mollies reproduce by gynogenesis, where sperm simply serves as stimulus for embryonic development, but is typically not incorporated into the offspring (Schlupp 2005) [...] The Amazon molly uses at least three species as sperm donors [...]

More importantly, this situation can be used to make very clear predictions relative to male mate choice. For males the fitness return for mating with Amazon mollies is very low. Even if the cost of mating is low or moderate, males should evolve to prefer conspecific females, or lower their cost by investing less into heterospecific copulations. Via mate copying, a process of using social information in mate choice (Varela et al. 2018, Witte et al. 2015), males gain an indirect fitness benefit offsetting some of the cost of heterospecific matings: the interactions of a sexual male and an Amazon molly are observed by conspecific females and make that male more attractive to conspecific females. Interestingly, males have also been shown to copy the mate choice of other males (Bierbach et al. 2011, Schlupp & Ryan 1997).


h/t: https://twitter.com/DegenRolf

Women & their mothers were strongly influenced by the physical attractiveness of target men & preferred the attractive & moderately attr. targets. Men with the most desirable personality profiles were rated more favorably only when they were at least moderately attractive

The Importance of Physical Attractiveness to the Mate Choices of Women and Their Mothers. Madeleine A. Fugère et al. Evolutionary Psychological Science. September 2017, Volume 3, Issue 3, pp 243–252. http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40806-017-0092-x

Abstract: Prior research investigating the mate preferences of women and their parents reveals two important findings with regard to physical attractiveness. First, daughters more strongly value mate characteristics connoting genetic quality (such as physical attractiveness) than their parents. Second, both daughters and their parents report valuing characteristics other than physical attractiveness most strongly (e.g., ambition/industriousness, friendliness/kindness). However, the prior research relies solely on self-report to assess daughters’ and parents’ preferences. We assessed mate preferences among 61 daughter-mother pairs using an experimental design varying target men’s physical attractiveness and trait profiles. We tested four hypotheses investigating whether a minimum level of physical attractiveness was a necessity to both women and their mothers and whether physical attractiveness was a more important determinant of dating desirability than trait profiles. These hypotheses were supported. Women and their mothers were strongly influenced by the physical attractiveness of the target men and preferred the attractive and moderately attractive targets. Men with the most desirable personality profiles were rated more favorably than their counterparts only when they were at least moderately attractive. Unattractive men were never rated as more desirable partners for daughters, even when they possessed the most desirable trait profiles. We conclude that a minimum level of physical attractiveness is a necessity for both women and their mothers and that when women and their parents state that other traits are more important than physical attractiveness, they assume potential mates meet a minimally acceptable standard of physical attractiveness.


Seems confirmation of this: Importance of physical attractiveness in dating behavior. Elaine Walster, Vera Aronson, Darcy Abrahams, Leon Rottman. December 1966, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 4(5):508-16. DOI10.1037/h0021188, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/17178647_Importance_of_physical_attractiveness_in_dating_behavior

Abstract: It was proposed that an individual would most often expect to date, would try to date, and would like a partner of approximately his own social desirability. In brief, we attempted to apply level of aspiration theory to choice of social goals. A field study was conducted in which individuals were randomly paired with one another at a "Computer Dance." Level of aspiration hypotheses were not confirmed. Regardless of S's own attractiveness, by far the largest determinant of how much his partner was liked, how much he wanted to date the partner again, and how often he actually asked the partner out was simply how attractive the partner was. Personality measures such as the MMPI, the Minnesota Counseling Inventory, and Berger's Scale of Self- Acceptance and intellectual measures such as the Minnesota Scholastic Aptitude Test, and high school percentile rank did not predict couple compatability. The only important determinant of S's liking for his date was the date's physical attractiveness.

h/t: https://twitter.com/DegenRolf

While religiosity positively predicts the acceptance of creationist views and negatively predicts the acceptance of evolution, scientific reasoning ability does not predict religiosity, acceptance of creationist views, or acceptance of evolutionary theory

Scientific reasoning ability does not predict scientific views on evolution among religious individuals. Katie F. Manwaring et al. Evolution: Education and Outreach. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12052-018-0076-8

Abstract

Background: Acceptance of evolutionary theory varies widely and is often associated with religious background. Some have suggested there exists an additional relationship between scientific reasoning ability and the acceptance of evolutionary theory. In this study, we used structural equation modeling to test whether scientific reasoning ability predicts religiosity, acceptance of creationist views, or acceptance of evolution. We administered internet-based surveys to 724 individuals nationwide who self-describe as being religious and built a structural-equation model to test predictive abilities.

Results: We found that while religiosity positively predicts the acceptance of creationist views and negatively predicts the acceptance of evolution, scientific reasoning ability does not predict religiosity, acceptance of creationist views, or acceptance of evolutionary theory.

Conclusions: With a lack of any relationship between scientific reasoning ability and acceptance, an approach to evolution education that focuses on appealing to scientific reasoning may prove fruitless in changing student attitudes toward evolution; alternative teaching approaches regarding evolution are warranted.

Tax revenue and public services under pirates and terrorists

The author believes he is doing something new... Anyway, it is a good summary of how ISIS financed the caliphate machinery.

The ISIS Files. By Rukmini Callimachi Photographs by Ivor Prickett
The New York Times, April 4, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/04/04/world/middleeast/isis-documents-mosul-iraq.html


1  revenue

The documents describe how it made money at every step in the supply chain: Before a single seed of grain, for example, was sown, the group collected rent for the fields it had confiscated. Then, when the crops were ready to be threshed, it collected a harvest tax.

It did not stop there.

The trucks that transported the grain paid highway tolls. The grain was stored in silos, which the militants controlled, and they made money when the grain was sold to mills, which they also controlled. The mills ground the grain into flour, which the group sold to traders.

Then the bags of flour were loaded onto trucks, which traversed the caliphate, paying more tolls. It was sold to supermarkets and shops, which were also taxed. So were the consumers who bought the finished product.

In a single 24-hour period in 2015, one of the spreadsheets in the briefcase shows, the Islamic State collected $1.9 million from the sale of barley and wheat.

Another table shows that the militants earned over $3 million in three months from gross flour sales in just three locations in Mosul.

The organization appeared intent on making money off every last grain — even crops that were damaged.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
On just one day, according to another statement, it took in over $14,000 from wheat described as having been scorched in a bombing, and $2,300 from the sale of spoiled lentils and chickpeas. It also took in over $23,000 from grain that had been scraped off the bottom of a tank, according to one spreadsheet. <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

The Islamic State’s tax arm reached into every facet of life in Mosul. Households in Iraq were taxed 2,000 dinars per month (less than $2) for garbage collection, 10,000 dinars (about $8) for each 10 amperes of electricity, and another 10,000 for municipal water.

Businesses wishing to install a landline paid a 15,000-dinar (about $12) installation fee to the group’s telecommunications office, followed by a 5,000-dinar monthly maintenance fee.

Municipal offices charged for marriage licenses and birth certificates.

But perhaps the most lucrative tax was [the] zakat ... It is calculated at 2.5 percent of an individual’s assets, and up to 10 percent for agricultural production, according to Ms. Revkin, the Yale researcher. While some of these fees had been charged by the Iraqi and Syrian governments, the mandatory asset tax was a new development.

Ordinarily in Islamic practice, the zakat is a tithe used to help the poor. In the Islamic State’s interpretation, an act of charity became a mandatory payment, and while some of the funds collected were used to help needy families, the Ministry of Zakat and Charities acted more like a version of the Internal Revenue Service.

Most accounts of how the Islamic State became the richest terrorist group in the world focus on its black-market oil sales, which at one point brought in as much as $2 million per week, according to some estimates. Yet records recovered in Syria by Mr. Tamimi and analyzed by Ms. Revkin show that the ratio of money earned from taxes versus oil stood at 6:1.

Despite hundreds of airstrikes that left the caliphate pocked with craters, the group’s economy continued to function, fed by streams of revenue that could not be bombed under international norms: the civilians under their rule, their commercial activity and the dirt under their feet.

According to estimates from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the land that the militants seized was Iraq’s most fertile, and at the group’s height, the fields that were harvested accounted for 40 percent of the country’s annual wheat production and more than half of its barley crop. In Syria, the group at one point controlled as much as 80 percent of the country’s cotton crop, according to a study by the Paris-based Center for the Analysis of Terrorism.

It all added up to astonishing sums, as much as $800 million in annual tax revenue, according to the study.

...

Tax collection continued until the very end. At least 100 documents
labeled “Daily Gross Revenue” that showed incoming cash were dated November 2016, a month after the start of the coalition’s push to take back the city.

Even as tanks were rolling in and taking surrounding neighborhoods, the trade division continued to make money, pocketing $70,000 in a single sale.



2  public services

But on the same thoroughfares, Mr. Hamoud noticed something that filled him with shame: The streets were visibly cleaner than they had been when the Iraqi government was in charge.

Omar Bilal Younes, a 42-year-old truck driver whose occupation allowed him to crisscross the caliphate, noticed the same improvement. “Garbage collection was No. 1 under ISIS,” he said, flashing a thumbs-up sign.

The street sweepers hadn’t changed. What had was that the militants imposed a discipline that had been lacking, said a half-dozen sanitation employees who worked under ISIS and who were interviewed in three towns after the group was forced out.

“The only thing I could do during the time of government rule is to give a worker a one-day suspension without pay,” said Salim Ali Sultan, who oversaw garbage collection both for the Iraqi government and later for the Islamic State in the northern Iraqi town of Tel Kaif. “Under ISIS, they could be imprisoned.”

The Strengths of Wisdom Provide Unique Contributions to Improved Leadership, Sustainability, Inequality, Gross National Happiness, and Civic Discourse in the Face of Contemporary World Problems

The Strengths of Wisdom Provide Unique Contributions to Improved Leadership, Sustainability, Inequality, Gross National Happiness, and Civic Discourse in the Face of Contemporary World Problems. Igor Grossmann and Justin P. Brienza. J. Intell. 2018, 6(2), 22; doi:10.3390/jintelligence6020022

Abstract: We present evidence for the strengths of the intellectual virtues that philosophers and behavioral scientists characterize as key cognitive elements of wisdom. Wisdom has been of centuries-long interest for philosophical scholarship, but relative to intelligence largely neglected in public discourse on educational science, public policy, and societal well-being. Wise reasoning characteristics include intellectual humility, recognition of uncertainty, consideration of diverse viewpoints, and an attempt to integrate these viewpoints. Emerging scholarship on these features of wisdom suggest that they uniquely contribute to societal well-being, improve leadership, shed light on societal inequality, promote cooperation in Public Goods Games and reduce political polarization and intergroup-hostility. We review empirical evidence about macro-cultural, ecological, situational, and person-level processes facilitating and inhibiting wisdom in daily life. Based on this evidence, we speculate about ways to foster wisdom in education, organizations, and institutions.

Keywords: wisdom; reasoning; virtues; well-being; political polarization; culture; social class; egocentrism; leadership

Check also Grossmann, Igor, and Harrison Oakes. 2017. “Wisdom of Yoda and Mr. Spock: The Role of Emotions and the Self”. PsyArXiv. December 21. https://www.bipartisanalliance.com/2017/12/wiser-reasoning-appeared-in-conjunction.html

wiser reasoning appeared in conjunction with greater (vs. lower) emotionality, especially the recognition of a greater number of present emotions and greater balance of intensity across experienced emotions.

And: Wisdom and how to cultivate it: Review of emerging evidence for a constructivist model of wise thinking. Igor Grossmann. European Psychologist, in press. Pre-print: http://www.bipartisanalliance.com/2017/08/wisdom-and-how-to-cultivate-it-review.html