Individual acquisition of “stick pounding” behavior by naïve chimpanzees. Elisa Bandini, Claudio Tennie. American Journal of Primatology, May 13 2019. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajp.22987
Abstract: Many studies investigating culture in nonhuman animals tend to focus on the inferred need of social learning mechanisms that transmit the form of a behavior to explain the population differences observed in wild animal behavioral repertoires. This research focus often results in studies overlooking the possibility of individuals being able to develop behavioral forms without requiring social learning. The disregard of individual learning abilities is most clearly observed in the nonhuman great ape literature, where there is a persistent claim that chimpanzee behaviors, in particular, require various forms of social learning mechanisms. These special social learning abilities have been argued to explain the acquisition of the relatively large behavioral repertoires observed across chimpanzee populations. However, current evidence suggests that although low‐fidelity social learning plays a role in harmonizing and stabilizing the frequency of behaviors within chimpanzee populations, some (if not all) of the forms that chimpanzee behaviors take may develop independently of social learning. If so, they would be latent solutions—behavioral forms that can (re‐)emerge even in the absence of observational opportunities, via individual (re)innovations. Through a combination of individual and low‐fidelity social learning, the population‐wide patterns of behaviors observed in great ape species are then established and stably maintained. This is the Zone of Latent Solutions (ZLS) hypothesis. The current study experimentally tested the ZLS hypothesis for pestle pounding, a wild chimpanzee behavior. We tested the reinnovation of this behavior in semi‐wild chimpanzees at Chimfunshi Wildlife Orphanage in Zambia, Africa, (N = 90, tested in four social groups). Crucially, all subjects were naïve to stick pounding before testing. Three out of the four tested groups reinnovated stick pounding—clearly demonstrating that this behavioral form does not require social learning. These findings provide support for the ZLS hypothesis alongside further evidence for the individual learning abilities of chimpanzees.
HIGHLIGHTS
* Naïve chimpanzees were provided the materials for wild pestle pounding behavior.
* Chimpanzees spontaneously demonstrated the same behavioral form as wild counterparts.
* Individual learning, contra to previous claims, is sufficient to drive this behavioral form in chimpanzees.
Tuesday, May 14, 2019
Consumers believe similar others would use the same products more often and would find them more useful than they themselves would; this is due to an overestimation of other people’s materialism
Ziano, Ignazio, and Daniel Villanova. 2019. “You’d Use It More Than Me: Overestimating Products’ Usefulness to Others Because of Self-serving Materialism Attributions.” PsyArXiv. May 14. doi:10.31234/osf.io/938m7
Abstract: Six experiments (total n = 3,552, four preregistered, three incentivized) show that consumers believe similar others would use the same products more often and would find them more useful than they themselves would. Overestimation of usefulness of the same product to others is caused by the overestimation of other people’s materialism: we find that this bias reverses when consumers estimate products’ usefulness for someone very low on materialism, and is muted for less materialistic purchases. Overestimation of usefulness is muted for well-known others, as estimation accuracy increases with personal knowledge. Our findings help explain the “X effect,” which is the belief that others are willing to pay more for products (Frederick 2012). These findings connect previously parallel literature streams about self-serving bias in social comparison and biases in self-other monetary evaluations. We discuss theoretical implications for consumers’ above and below average biases, materialism, and the X effect. We discuss practical implications for pricing, negotiation, proxy decision-making, and gift-giving.
Abstract: Six experiments (total n = 3,552, four preregistered, three incentivized) show that consumers believe similar others would use the same products more often and would find them more useful than they themselves would. Overestimation of usefulness of the same product to others is caused by the overestimation of other people’s materialism: we find that this bias reverses when consumers estimate products’ usefulness for someone very low on materialism, and is muted for less materialistic purchases. Overestimation of usefulness is muted for well-known others, as estimation accuracy increases with personal knowledge. Our findings help explain the “X effect,” which is the belief that others are willing to pay more for products (Frederick 2012). These findings connect previously parallel literature streams about self-serving bias in social comparison and biases in self-other monetary evaluations. We discuss theoretical implications for consumers’ above and below average biases, materialism, and the X effect. We discuss practical implications for pricing, negotiation, proxy decision-making, and gift-giving.
From 2017: The magnitude of pain sensitivity correlated with the extent to which participants experienced unfairness, due to the shared human alarm system of unfairness and pain sensitivity
From 2017: Individual differences in pain sensitivity predict the experience of unfairness. Haixia Wang, Kefeng Li, Xiaofei Xie. Journal of Health Psychology, January 5, 2017. https://doi.org/10.1177/1359105316685902
Abstract: Pain has shaped our evolutionary history, and pain-free experiences are critical for our health. There are, however, enormous individual differences in pain sensitivity, and the psychological consequences of this heterogeneity are only poorly understood. Here, we investigated whether individual differences in pain sensitivity predicted the experience of unfairness. We found that the magnitude of pain sensitivity correlated with the extent to which participants experienced unfairness. This association was due to the shared human alarm system of unfairness and pain sensitivity. This finding may elucidate mechanisms for producing a new and positive cycle of a healthy experience between fairness and feeling pain-free.
Keywords: experience of unfairness, individual differences, pain sensitivity, pain threshold, pain tolerance
Abstract: Pain has shaped our evolutionary history, and pain-free experiences are critical for our health. There are, however, enormous individual differences in pain sensitivity, and the psychological consequences of this heterogeneity are only poorly understood. Here, we investigated whether individual differences in pain sensitivity predicted the experience of unfairness. We found that the magnitude of pain sensitivity correlated with the extent to which participants experienced unfairness. This association was due to the shared human alarm system of unfairness and pain sensitivity. This finding may elucidate mechanisms for producing a new and positive cycle of a healthy experience between fairness and feeling pain-free.
Keywords: experience of unfairness, individual differences, pain sensitivity, pain threshold, pain tolerance
Perception of love regulation: Participants thought that they could exaggerate & suppress expressions of infatuation, attachment, & sexual desire, but that they could not start and stop infatuation and attachment, or start sexual desire
Perceived ability to regulate love. Kruti Surti, Sandra J. E. Langeslag. PLOS, May 13, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0216523
Abstract: Research has shown that romantic love can be regulated. We investigated perceptions about love regulation, because these perceptions may impact mental health and influence love regulation application. Two-hundred eighty-six participants completed a series of items online via Qualtrics that assessed perceived ability to up- and down-regulate, exaggerate and suppress the expression of, and start and stop different love types. We also tested individual differences in perceived love regulation ability. Participants thought that they could up- but not down-regulate love in general and that they could up-regulate love in general more than down-regulate it. Participants thought that they could up-regulate infatuation less than attachment and sexual desire. Participants also thought that they could exaggerate and suppress expressions of infatuation, attachment, and sexual desire, but that they could not start and stop infatuation and attachment, or start sexual desire. The more participants habitually used cognitive reappraisal, the more they thought that they could up- and down-regulate infatuation and attachment and up-regulate sexual desire. The more participants were infatuated with their beloved, the more they thought that they could up- but not down-regulate infatuation, attachment, and sexual desire. Finally, participants thought that they could up- and down-regulate happiness more than infatuation These findings are a first step toward the development of psychoeducation techniques to correct inaccurate love regulation perceptions, which may improve mental health and love regulation in daily life.
Abstract: Research has shown that romantic love can be regulated. We investigated perceptions about love regulation, because these perceptions may impact mental health and influence love regulation application. Two-hundred eighty-six participants completed a series of items online via Qualtrics that assessed perceived ability to up- and down-regulate, exaggerate and suppress the expression of, and start and stop different love types. We also tested individual differences in perceived love regulation ability. Participants thought that they could up- but not down-regulate love in general and that they could up-regulate love in general more than down-regulate it. Participants thought that they could up-regulate infatuation less than attachment and sexual desire. Participants also thought that they could exaggerate and suppress expressions of infatuation, attachment, and sexual desire, but that they could not start and stop infatuation and attachment, or start sexual desire. The more participants habitually used cognitive reappraisal, the more they thought that they could up- and down-regulate infatuation and attachment and up-regulate sexual desire. The more participants were infatuated with their beloved, the more they thought that they could up- but not down-regulate infatuation, attachment, and sexual desire. Finally, participants thought that they could up- and down-regulate happiness more than infatuation These findings are a first step toward the development of psychoeducation techniques to correct inaccurate love regulation perceptions, which may improve mental health and love regulation in daily life.
Monday, May 13, 2019
Impact of public sector salary disclosure laws on university faculty salaries in Canada: The laws reduced salaries on average, although they reduced the gender pay gap between men and women
Pay Transparency and the Gender Gap. Michael Baker, Yosh Halberstam, Kory Kroft, Alexandre Mas, Derek Messacar. NBER Working Paper No. 25834. May 2019. https://www.nber.org/papers/w25834
Abstract: We examine the impact of public sector salary disclosure laws on university faculty salaries in Canada. The laws, which enable public access to the salaries of individual faculty if they exceed specified thresholds, were introduced in different provinces at different points in time. Using detailed administrative data covering the universe of faculty in Canada and an event-study research design, we document three key findings. First, the disclosure laws reduced salaries on average. Second, the laws reduced the gender pay gap between men and women. Third, the closure of the gender gap is primarily in universities where faculty are unionized.
Abstract: We examine the impact of public sector salary disclosure laws on university faculty salaries in Canada. The laws, which enable public access to the salaries of individual faculty if they exceed specified thresholds, were introduced in different provinces at different points in time. Using detailed administrative data covering the universe of faculty in Canada and an event-study research design, we document three key findings. First, the disclosure laws reduced salaries on average. Second, the laws reduced the gender pay gap between men and women. Third, the closure of the gender gap is primarily in universities where faculty are unionized.
Relationship between paraphilic interests, sex, and sexual and life satisfaction in non-clinical samples: Those with paraphilic interests rarely felt negatively affected
Exploring the relationship between paraphilic interests, sex, and sexual and life satisfaction in non-clinical samples. Crystal L. Mundy, Jan D. Cioe. The Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality, May 13, 2019. https://doi.org/10.3138/cjhs.2018-0041
Abstract: Limited research has indicated that paraphilic interests and behaviours do not necessarily decrease sexual and life satisfaction; some research suggests such interests may actually enhance satisfaction. The present study assessed how paraphilic-associated interests and behaviours were related to sexual and life satisfaction in a sample of 173 men and 356 women. Paraphilic interest rates were similar to existing population-based studies. Men reported significantly higher levels of most paraphilic interests than women, apart from masochism. Those with paraphilic interests rarely felt negatively affected. However, those interested in criminal paraphilic interests or both criminal and legally feasible paraphilic interests had lower levels of sexual satisfaction when they did not engage in paraphilia-associated sexual behaviour. The sexual satisfaction of those interested only in legally feasible paraphilic interests was not impacted whether or not they engaged in paraphilia-associated sexual behaviour. Further analyses indicated that those without a paraphilic interest and those who have a paraphilic interest and have disclosed to their partner have higher levels of sexual satisfaction than those who have not disclosed to their partner or who do not have a stable partner. Additionally, among those who had disclosed to a partner, sexual satisfaction was not affected whether the individual engaged in the paraphilic interest with or without their partner. These results suggest a multifaceted relationship that warrants further consideration and examination.
Key Words: Gender differences, paraphilia, paraphilic interests, sexual behaviour, sexual satisfaction
Abstract: Limited research has indicated that paraphilic interests and behaviours do not necessarily decrease sexual and life satisfaction; some research suggests such interests may actually enhance satisfaction. The present study assessed how paraphilic-associated interests and behaviours were related to sexual and life satisfaction in a sample of 173 men and 356 women. Paraphilic interest rates were similar to existing population-based studies. Men reported significantly higher levels of most paraphilic interests than women, apart from masochism. Those with paraphilic interests rarely felt negatively affected. However, those interested in criminal paraphilic interests or both criminal and legally feasible paraphilic interests had lower levels of sexual satisfaction when they did not engage in paraphilia-associated sexual behaviour. The sexual satisfaction of those interested only in legally feasible paraphilic interests was not impacted whether or not they engaged in paraphilia-associated sexual behaviour. Further analyses indicated that those without a paraphilic interest and those who have a paraphilic interest and have disclosed to their partner have higher levels of sexual satisfaction than those who have not disclosed to their partner or who do not have a stable partner. Additionally, among those who had disclosed to a partner, sexual satisfaction was not affected whether the individual engaged in the paraphilic interest with or without their partner. These results suggest a multifaceted relationship that warrants further consideration and examination.
Key Words: Gender differences, paraphilia, paraphilic interests, sexual behaviour, sexual satisfaction
Rolf Degen summarizing: Changing implicit biases did neither affect explicit biases nor actual behavior (co-authored by Brian A. Nosek, who was significantly involved in developing the IAT)
Forscher, Patrick S., Calvin K. Lai, Jordan Axt, Charles R. Ebersole, Michelle Herman, Patricia G. Devine, and Brian A. Nosek. 2016. “A Meta-analysis of Procedures to Change Implicit Measures.” PsyArXiv. August 15. doi:10.31234/osf.io/dv8tu
Abstract: Using a novel technique known as network meta-analysis, we synthesized evidence from 492 studies (87,418 participants) to investigate the effectiveness of procedures in changing implicit measures, which we define as response biases on implicit tasks. We also evaluated these procedures’ effects on explicit and behavioral measures. We found that implicit measures can be changed, but effects are often relatively weak (|ds| < .30). Most studies focused on producing short-term changes with brief, single-session manipulations. Procedures that associate sets of concepts, invoke goals or motivations, or tax mental resources changed implicit measures the most, whereas procedures that induced threat, affirmation, or specific moods/emotions changed implicit measures the least. Bias tests suggested that implicit effects could be inflated relative to their true population values. Procedures changed explicit measures less consistently and to a smaller degree than implicit measures and generally produced trivial changes in behavior. Finally, changes in implicit measures did not mediate changes in explicit measures or behavior. Our findings suggest that changes in implicit measures are possible, but those changes do not necessarily translate into changes in explicit measures or behavior.
Abstract: Using a novel technique known as network meta-analysis, we synthesized evidence from 492 studies (87,418 participants) to investigate the effectiveness of procedures in changing implicit measures, which we define as response biases on implicit tasks. We also evaluated these procedures’ effects on explicit and behavioral measures. We found that implicit measures can be changed, but effects are often relatively weak (|ds| < .30). Most studies focused on producing short-term changes with brief, single-session manipulations. Procedures that associate sets of concepts, invoke goals or motivations, or tax mental resources changed implicit measures the most, whereas procedures that induced threat, affirmation, or specific moods/emotions changed implicit measures the least. Bias tests suggested that implicit effects could be inflated relative to their true population values. Procedures changed explicit measures less consistently and to a smaller degree than implicit measures and generally produced trivial changes in behavior. Finally, changes in implicit measures did not mediate changes in explicit measures or behavior. Our findings suggest that changes in implicit measures are possible, but those changes do not necessarily translate into changes in explicit measures or behavior.
It is reported that identification as a liberal or conservative shapes lifestyle orientations & behaviors; apply caution against wide‐ranging claims
How Much Do Liberal and Conservative Identifiers Differ in the United States? Clem Brooks, Adam Nicholson. Sociological Inquiry, May 12 2019. https://doi.org/10.1111/soin.12286
We thank Catherine Bolzendahl, Paul Burstein, Brian Powell, Patricia McManus, and Amanda Weiss for comments.
Abstract: Recent scholarship has reported that identification as a liberal or conservative shapes lifestyle orientations and behaviors. Liberal/conservative differences with respect to such arenas as family and religion go beyond ideological identification research's traditional focus on policy attitudes and political processes. But are differences on non‐political issues as large as those relating to political ones? This question has yet to be addressed, and it is critical to putting in firmer perspective the degree to which liberal and conservative identifiers differ in the United States. We take up investigation through analysis of 106 items from the General Social Survey 2006 panel. We compare ideological identification's influence with respect to political versus non‐political orientations and behaviors. Application of Morgan and Winship's model of causal inference builds from past studies’ cross‐sectional analysis. Results extend ideological identification scholarship, while cautioning against wide‐ranging claims advanced by several public commentators.
The Influence of Ideological Identification
Established Scholarship
Traditionally, the focus of ideological identification scholarship has been on political phenomena, what we will refer to by shorthand as government, law, and politicians. In the United States, there is ample evidence that liberal and conservative identifiers tend to differ across a range of policy attitudes and with respect to their choice of candidate in national elections (e.g., Abramowitz 2013; Abramson et al. 2015; Chapter 6; Erikson and Tedin 2016, Chapter 3). Ideological identification is relevant for political behavior and attitude formation in other nations as well (e.g., Hellwig 2008; Jou and Dalton 2017; Mair 2007), albeit with variation across context.
Identification as a liberal or conservative has traditionally been viewed as a powerful and potentially self‐reinforcing heuristic (Sniderman, Brody, and Tetlock 1991; see also Lau and Sears 1986). When ideological identification is made salient by political cues in the environment, liberal identifiers form positive attitudes toward objects they associate with liberals/liberalism (e.g., government, legal activism) and oppose those associated with conservatives/conservatism (e.g., unregulated markets, traditional social arrangements) (Fuchs and Klingemann 1990; Miller and Shanks 1996). Conservative identifiers follow the reverse expectation. Ideological identification's influence can be self‐reinforcing if identifiers’ choices feed back into their perceptions (Lodge and Taber 2013; see also Granberg and Brent 1980; Merrill, Grofman, and Adams 2001).
Research on polarization among U.S. politicians is relevant to ideological identification scholarship. Poole and Rosenthal's agenda‐setting analysis of roll call voting in Congress (1997; see also McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal 2006) finds that since the 1960s, Democratic Senators and House Members have moved to the left and their Republican counterparts have moved to the right. For over four decades, American voters have formed policy attitudes and made electoral choices in an environment increasingly defined by cues regarding prototypically liberal versus conservative politicians and policies. This buttresses the established scholarly view of ideological identification as a source of influence as regards voting and policy‐attitude formation.2
We thank Catherine Bolzendahl, Paul Burstein, Brian Powell, Patricia McManus, and Amanda Weiss for comments.
Abstract: Recent scholarship has reported that identification as a liberal or conservative shapes lifestyle orientations and behaviors. Liberal/conservative differences with respect to such arenas as family and religion go beyond ideological identification research's traditional focus on policy attitudes and political processes. But are differences on non‐political issues as large as those relating to political ones? This question has yet to be addressed, and it is critical to putting in firmer perspective the degree to which liberal and conservative identifiers differ in the United States. We take up investigation through analysis of 106 items from the General Social Survey 2006 panel. We compare ideological identification's influence with respect to political versus non‐political orientations and behaviors. Application of Morgan and Winship's model of causal inference builds from past studies’ cross‐sectional analysis. Results extend ideological identification scholarship, while cautioning against wide‐ranging claims advanced by several public commentators.
The Influence of Ideological Identification
Established Scholarship
Traditionally, the focus of ideological identification scholarship has been on political phenomena, what we will refer to by shorthand as government, law, and politicians. In the United States, there is ample evidence that liberal and conservative identifiers tend to differ across a range of policy attitudes and with respect to their choice of candidate in national elections (e.g., Abramowitz 2013; Abramson et al. 2015; Chapter 6; Erikson and Tedin 2016, Chapter 3). Ideological identification is relevant for political behavior and attitude formation in other nations as well (e.g., Hellwig 2008; Jou and Dalton 2017; Mair 2007), albeit with variation across context.
Identification as a liberal or conservative has traditionally been viewed as a powerful and potentially self‐reinforcing heuristic (Sniderman, Brody, and Tetlock 1991; see also Lau and Sears 1986). When ideological identification is made salient by political cues in the environment, liberal identifiers form positive attitudes toward objects they associate with liberals/liberalism (e.g., government, legal activism) and oppose those associated with conservatives/conservatism (e.g., unregulated markets, traditional social arrangements) (Fuchs and Klingemann 1990; Miller and Shanks 1996). Conservative identifiers follow the reverse expectation. Ideological identification's influence can be self‐reinforcing if identifiers’ choices feed back into their perceptions (Lodge and Taber 2013; see also Granberg and Brent 1980; Merrill, Grofman, and Adams 2001).
Research on polarization among U.S. politicians is relevant to ideological identification scholarship. Poole and Rosenthal's agenda‐setting analysis of roll call voting in Congress (1997; see also McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal 2006) finds that since the 1960s, Democratic Senators and House Members have moved to the left and their Republican counterparts have moved to the right. For over four decades, American voters have formed policy attitudes and made electoral choices in an environment increasingly defined by cues regarding prototypically liberal versus conservative politicians and policies. This buttresses the established scholarly view of ideological identification as a source of influence as regards voting and policy‐attitude formation.2
Randomized experiments are criticized on ethical grounds even as similar, untested interventions are implemented without objection; aversion is also among those with higher educational attainment & science literacy & among professionals
Objecting to experiments that compare two unobjectionable policies or treatments. Michelle N. Meyer, Patrick R. Heck, Geoffrey S. Holtzman, Stephen M. Anderson, William Cai, Duncan J. Watts, and Christopher F. Chabris. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, May 9, 2019 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1820701116
Significance: Randomized experiments—long the gold standard in medicine—are increasingly used throughout the social sciences and professions to evaluate business products and services, government programs, education and health policies, and global aid. We find robust evidence—across 16 studies of 5,873 participants from three populations spanning nine domains—that people often approve of untested policies or treatments (A or B) being universally implemented but disapprove of randomized experiments (A/B tests) to determine which of those policies or treatments is superior. This effect persists even when there is no reason to prefer A to B and even when recipients are treated unequally and randomly in all conditions (A, B, and A/B). This experimentation aversion may be an important barrier to evidence-based practice.
Abstract: Randomized experiments have enormous potential to improve human welfare in many domains, including healthcare, education, finance, and public policy. However, such “A/B tests” are often criticized on ethical grounds even as similar, untested interventions are implemented without objection. We find robust evidence across 16 studies of 5,873 participants from three diverse populations spanning nine domains—from healthcare to autonomous vehicle design to poverty reduction—that people frequently rate A/B tests designed to establish the comparative effectiveness of two policies or treatments as inappropriate even when universally implementing either A or B, untested, is seen as appropriate. This “A/B effect” is as strong among those with higher educational attainment and science literacy and among relevant professionals. It persists even when there is no reason to prefer A to B and even when recipients are treated unequally and randomly in all conditions (A, B, and A/B). Several remaining explanations for the effect—a belief that consent is required to impose a policy on half of a population but not on the entire population; an aversion to controlled but not to uncontrolled experiments; and a proxy form of the illusion of knowledge (according to which randomized evaluations are unnecessary because experts already do or should know “what works”)—appear to contribute to the effect, but none dominates or fully accounts for it. We conclude that rigorously evaluating policies or treatments via pragmatic randomized trials may provoke greater objection than simply implementing those same policies or treatments untested.
Keywords: field experimentsA/B testsrandomized controlled trialspragmatic trialsresearch ethics
Significance: Randomized experiments—long the gold standard in medicine—are increasingly used throughout the social sciences and professions to evaluate business products and services, government programs, education and health policies, and global aid. We find robust evidence—across 16 studies of 5,873 participants from three populations spanning nine domains—that people often approve of untested policies or treatments (A or B) being universally implemented but disapprove of randomized experiments (A/B tests) to determine which of those policies or treatments is superior. This effect persists even when there is no reason to prefer A to B and even when recipients are treated unequally and randomly in all conditions (A, B, and A/B). This experimentation aversion may be an important barrier to evidence-based practice.
Abstract: Randomized experiments have enormous potential to improve human welfare in many domains, including healthcare, education, finance, and public policy. However, such “A/B tests” are often criticized on ethical grounds even as similar, untested interventions are implemented without objection. We find robust evidence across 16 studies of 5,873 participants from three diverse populations spanning nine domains—from healthcare to autonomous vehicle design to poverty reduction—that people frequently rate A/B tests designed to establish the comparative effectiveness of two policies or treatments as inappropriate even when universally implementing either A or B, untested, is seen as appropriate. This “A/B effect” is as strong among those with higher educational attainment and science literacy and among relevant professionals. It persists even when there is no reason to prefer A to B and even when recipients are treated unequally and randomly in all conditions (A, B, and A/B). Several remaining explanations for the effect—a belief that consent is required to impose a policy on half of a population but not on the entire population; an aversion to controlled but not to uncontrolled experiments; and a proxy form of the illusion of knowledge (according to which randomized evaluations are unnecessary because experts already do or should know “what works”)—appear to contribute to the effect, but none dominates or fully accounts for it. We conclude that rigorously evaluating policies or treatments via pragmatic randomized trials may provoke greater objection than simply implementing those same policies or treatments untested.
Keywords: field experimentsA/B testsrandomized controlled trialspragmatic trialsresearch ethics
Acne, Human Capital, & the Labor Market: Having acne is strongly positively associated with overall grade point average in high school, grades in high school English, history, math, and science, & the completion of a college degree
Do Pimples Pay? Acne, Human Capital, and the Labor Market. Hugo M. Mialon, Erik T. Nesson. Journal of Human Capital, Volume 13, Number 1, Spring 2019. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/701436
Abstract: We use data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health to investigate the association between having acne in middle to high school and subsequent educational and labor market outcomes. We find that having acne is strongly positively associated with overall grade point average in high school, grades in high school English, history, math, and science, and the completion of a college degree. We also find evidence that acne is associated with higher personal labor market earnings for women. We further explore a possible channel through which acne may affect education and earnings.
Abstract: We use data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health to investigate the association between having acne in middle to high school and subsequent educational and labor market outcomes. We find that having acne is strongly positively associated with overall grade point average in high school, grades in high school English, history, math, and science, and the completion of a college degree. We also find evidence that acne is associated with higher personal labor market earnings for women. We further explore a possible channel through which acne may affect education and earnings.
Sexual identity & wellbeing: Gender is found to play a significant role only for homosexuals; lesbians tend to be happier than heterosexuals; bisexuals of any gender are the least satisfied with life of all sexual groups
Sexual identity and wellbeing: A distributional analysis. Samuel Mann, David Blackby, Nigel O’Leary. Economics Letters, May 13 2019. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.econlet.2019.04.023
Highlights
• Heterosexual and sexual minority wellbeing gaps differ across sexual identities.
• The effect on wellbeing of being a sexual minority differs across the distribution.
• Gender is found to play a significant role only for homosexuals.
• Lesbians tend to be happier than their heterosexual counterparts.
• Bisexuals are the least satisfied with life of all sexual groups.
Abstract: The relationship between sexual identity and wellbeing is analysed in an unconditional panel quantile setting. There is heterogeneity across sexual identity and gender for homosexuals and, for all but lesbians, sexual minorities are less satisfied than heterosexuals below the median of the wellbeing distribution. Meanwhile, bisexuals of any gender are the least satisfied of any sexual group, and this is apparent across the entire wellbeing distribution. In contrast, the happiest individuals who report an ‘other’ sexual orientation are happier than the happiest heterosexuals.
Highlights
• Heterosexual and sexual minority wellbeing gaps differ across sexual identities.
• The effect on wellbeing of being a sexual minority differs across the distribution.
• Gender is found to play a significant role only for homosexuals.
• Lesbians tend to be happier than their heterosexual counterparts.
• Bisexuals are the least satisfied with life of all sexual groups.
Abstract: The relationship between sexual identity and wellbeing is analysed in an unconditional panel quantile setting. There is heterogeneity across sexual identity and gender for homosexuals and, for all but lesbians, sexual minorities are less satisfied than heterosexuals below the median of the wellbeing distribution. Meanwhile, bisexuals of any gender are the least satisfied of any sexual group, and this is apparent across the entire wellbeing distribution. In contrast, the happiest individuals who report an ‘other’ sexual orientation are happier than the happiest heterosexuals.
Strange-face illusions during eye-to-eye gazing in dyads: specific effects on derealization, depersonalization and dissociative identity
Strange-face illusions during eye-to-eye gazing in dyads: specific effects on derealization, depersonalization and dissociative identity. Giovanni B Caputo. Journal of Trauma & Dissociation, April 2019, DOI: 10.1080/15299732.2019.1597807
Abstract: Experimentally induced strange-face illusions can be perceived when two individuals look at each other in the eyes under low illumination for about 10 minutes. This task of subject-other eye-to-eye gazing produces the following perceptions by the subject: (i) mild to huge deformations and color/shape changes of face and facial features; (ii) lifeless, unmoving faces and immaterial presences akin to out-of-body experiences; (iii) pseudo-hallucinations, enlightened ‘idealized’ faces and personalities – rather than the other’s actual face. Dissociative phenomena seem to be involved, whereas the effects of non-pathological dissociation on strange-face illusions have not yet been directly investigated. In the present study, dissociative perceptions and strange-face illusions were measured through self-report questionnaires on a large sample (N = 90) of healthy young individuals. Results of correlation and factor analyses suggest that strange-face illusions can involve, respectively: (i) strange-face illusions correlated to derealization; (ii) strange-face illusions correlated to depersonalization; and (iii) strange-face illusions of identity, which are supposedly correlated to identity dissociation. The findings support the separation between detachment and compartmentalization in dissociative processes. Effects of gender show that strange-face illusions are more frequent in men with respect to women if dyads are composed of individuals of different-gender. Furthermore, drawings of strange-faces, which were perceived by portrait artists in place the others’ faces, allowed a direct illustration of examples of dissociative identities. Findings are discussed in relation to the three-level model of self-referential processing.
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Popular version: Locking Eyes with a Monster: Staring at somebody’s face for ten minutes may give you nightmares. Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen L. Macknik. Scientific American blog, May 7, 2019. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/illusion-chasers/locking-eyes-with-a-monster
"Caputo asked 50 subjects to gaze at their reflected faces in a mirror for a 10-minute session. After less than a minute, most observers began to perceive the “strange-face illusion.” The participants’ descriptions included huge deformations of their own faces; seeing the faces of alive or deceased parents; archetypal faces such as an old woman, child or the portrait of an ancestor; animal faces such as a cat, pig or lion; and even fantastical and monstrous beings. All 50 participants reported feelings of “otherness” when confronted with a face that seemed suddenly unfamiliar. Some felt powerful emotions."
Abstract: Experimentally induced strange-face illusions can be perceived when two individuals look at each other in the eyes under low illumination for about 10 minutes. This task of subject-other eye-to-eye gazing produces the following perceptions by the subject: (i) mild to huge deformations and color/shape changes of face and facial features; (ii) lifeless, unmoving faces and immaterial presences akin to out-of-body experiences; (iii) pseudo-hallucinations, enlightened ‘idealized’ faces and personalities – rather than the other’s actual face. Dissociative phenomena seem to be involved, whereas the effects of non-pathological dissociation on strange-face illusions have not yet been directly investigated. In the present study, dissociative perceptions and strange-face illusions were measured through self-report questionnaires on a large sample (N = 90) of healthy young individuals. Results of correlation and factor analyses suggest that strange-face illusions can involve, respectively: (i) strange-face illusions correlated to derealization; (ii) strange-face illusions correlated to depersonalization; and (iii) strange-face illusions of identity, which are supposedly correlated to identity dissociation. The findings support the separation between detachment and compartmentalization in dissociative processes. Effects of gender show that strange-face illusions are more frequent in men with respect to women if dyads are composed of individuals of different-gender. Furthermore, drawings of strange-faces, which were perceived by portrait artists in place the others’ faces, allowed a direct illustration of examples of dissociative identities. Findings are discussed in relation to the three-level model of self-referential processing.
---
Popular version: Locking Eyes with a Monster: Staring at somebody’s face for ten minutes may give you nightmares. Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen L. Macknik. Scientific American blog, May 7, 2019. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/illusion-chasers/locking-eyes-with-a-monster
"Caputo asked 50 subjects to gaze at their reflected faces in a mirror for a 10-minute session. After less than a minute, most observers began to perceive the “strange-face illusion.” The participants’ descriptions included huge deformations of their own faces; seeing the faces of alive or deceased parents; archetypal faces such as an old woman, child or the portrait of an ancestor; animal faces such as a cat, pig or lion; and even fantastical and monstrous beings. All 50 participants reported feelings of “otherness” when confronted with a face that seemed suddenly unfamiliar. Some felt powerful emotions."
Sunday, May 12, 2019
Why books and lectures/school don’t work, according to Andy Matuschak
Why books don’t work. Andy Matuschak. Blog, May 11 2019. https://andymatuschak.org/books
[...]
Picture some serious non-fiction tomes. The Selfish Gene; Thinking, Fast and Slow; Guns, Germs, and Steel; etc. Have you ever had a book like this—one you’d read—come up in conversation, only to discover that you’d absorbed what amounts to a few sentences? I’ll be honest: it happens to me regularly. Often things go well at first. I’ll feel I can sketch the basic claims, paint the surface; but when someone asks a basic probing question, the edifice instantly collapses. Sometimes it’s a memory issue: I simply can’t recall the relevant details. But just as often, as I grasp about, I’ll realize I had never really understood the idea in question, though I’d certainly thought I understood when I read the book. Indeed, I’ll realize that I had barely noticed how little I’d absorbed until that very moment.
I know I’m not alone here. When I share this observation with others—even others, like myself, who take learning seriously—it seems that everyone has had a similar experience. The conversation often feels confessional: there’s some bashfulness, almost as if these lapses reveal some unusual character flaw. I don’t think it’s a character flaw, but whatever it is, it’s certainly not unusual. In fact, I suspect this is the default experience for most readers. The situation only feels embarrassing because it’s hard to see how common it is.
Now, the books I named aren’t small investments. Each takes around 6–9 hours to read. Adult American college graduates read 24 minutes a day on average, so a typical reader might spend much of a month with one of these books. Millions of people have read each of these books, so that’s tens of millions of hours spent. In exchange for all that time, how much knowledge was absorbed? How many people absorbed most of the knowledge the author intended to convey? Or even just what they intended to acquire? I suspect it’s a small minority
[...]
I’m not suggesting that all those hours were wasted. Many readers enjoyed reading those books. That’s wonderful! Certainly most readers absorbed something, however ineffable: points of view, ways of thinking, norms, inspiration, and so on. Indeed, for many books (and in particular most fiction), these effects are the point.
This essay is not about that kind of book. It’s about explanatory non-fiction like the books I mentioned above, which aim to convey detailed knowledge. Some people may have read Thinking, Fast and Slow for entertainment value, but in exchange for their tens of millions of collective hours, I suspect many readers—or maybe even most readers—expected to walk away with more. Why else would we feel so startled when we notice how little we’ve absorbed from something we’ve read?
All this suggests a peculiar conclusion: as a medium, books are surprisingly bad at conveying knowledge, and readers mostly don’t realize it.
[...]
Why lectures don’t work
We’ve been discussing books so far, but have you ever had the same type of experience with a lecture? It’s easy to attend a lecture and feel that you understand, only to discover over that night’s problem set that you understood very little. Memory feels partly to blame: you might sense that you knew certain details at one time, but you’ve forgotten. Yet we can’t pin this all on memory. When you pull on certain strings from the lecture, you might discover that you had never really understood, though you’d certainly thought you understood during the lecture.
[...]
Like books, lectures can be entertaining or influential; like books, lectures do seem to work… sometimes, for some people. But you probably don’t believe that lectures are a reliable way to convey knowledge.
Books don’t work for the same reason that lectures don’t work: neither medium has any explicit theory of how people actually learn things, and as a result, both mediums accidentally (and mostly invisibly) evolved around a theory that’s plainly false.
To illustrate what I mean, I’ll try to draw on your own learning experiences. You’ve probably discovered that certain strategies help you absorb new ideas: solving interesting problems, writing chapter summaries, doing creative projects, etc. Whatever strategies you prefer, they’re not magic. There’s a reason they work (when they do): they’re leveraging some underlying truth about your cognition—about the way you think and learn. In many cases, the truth is not just about your cognition but about human cognition in general.
If we collect enough of these underlying “truths,” some shared themes might emerge, suggesting a more coherent theory of how learning happens. We’ll call such theories cognitive models. Some learning strategies suggest the same model; others suggest conflicting models. Some of these models are empirically testable; others aren’t; still others are already known to be false. By focusing on these models, instead of a herd of one-off strategies, we can seek more general implications. We can ask: if we take a particular cognitive model seriously, what does it suggest will (or won’t) help us understand something?
That’s an important question because it’s hard to convey knowledge. Most lecture attendees don’t absorb the intended knowledge; most book readers don’t absorb the intended knowledge. Failure is the default here. So if you hope to help others understand things, you had better draw on some great ideas about how people learn. It would be nice if this weren’t true. It would be nice if one could simply explain an idea clearly to someone, then trust that they’ve understood it. Unfortunately, as you’ve likely seen in classrooms and in your own life, complex ideas are rarely understood so automatically.
Lectures, as a medium, have no carefully-considered cognitive model at their foundation. Yet if we were aliens observing typical lectures from afar, we might notice the implicit model they appear to share: “the lecturer says words describing an idea; the class hears the words and maybe scribbles in a notebook; then the class understands the idea.” In learning sciences, we call this model “transmissionism.” It’s the notion that knowledge can be directly transmitted from teacher to student, like transcribing text from one page onto another. If only! The idea is so thoroughly discredited that “transmissionism” is only used pejoratively [...].
Of course, good lecturers don’t usually believe that simply telling their audience about an idea causes them to understand it. It’s just that lectures, as a format, are shaped as if that were true, so lecturers mostly behave as if it were true.
If pressed, many lecturers would offer a more plausible cognitive model: understanding actually comes after the lecture, when attendees solve problem sets, write essays, etc. The lecture provides the raw information for those later activities. Great: that’s a real model, and parts of it are supported by cognitive science. But if we’d begun with this model, would we have chosen live, ninety-minute speeches to convey raw information for a problem set?
Listeners’ attention wanders after a few minutes, so wouldn’t we want to interleave the problem-solving sessions with the lecture? Live speeches can’t be paused or rewound, so aren’t they awfully lossy for conveying raw information? People can read much more quickly than a lecturer speaks, so wouldn’t text be more efficient? And so on—it’s already clear that the traditional lecture format isn’t particularly informed by this model.
The lectures-as-warmup model is a post-hoc rationalization, but it does gesture at a deep theory about cognition: to understand something, you must actively engage with it. That notion, taken seriously, would utterly transform classrooms. We’d prioritize activities like interactive discussions and projects; we’d deploy direct instruction only when it’s the best way to enable those activities. [...]
In summary: lectures don’t work because the medium lacks a functioning cognitive model. It’s (implicitly) built on a faulty idea about how people learn—transmissionism—which we can caricaturize as “lecturer says words describing an idea; students hear words; then they understand.” When lectures do work, it’s generally as part of a broader learning context (e.g. projects, problem sets) with a better cognitive model. But the lectures aren’t pulling their weight. If we really wanted to adopt the better model, we’d ditch the lectures, and indeed, that’s what’s been happening in US K–12 education.
[...]
[...]
Picture some serious non-fiction tomes. The Selfish Gene; Thinking, Fast and Slow; Guns, Germs, and Steel; etc. Have you ever had a book like this—one you’d read—come up in conversation, only to discover that you’d absorbed what amounts to a few sentences? I’ll be honest: it happens to me regularly. Often things go well at first. I’ll feel I can sketch the basic claims, paint the surface; but when someone asks a basic probing question, the edifice instantly collapses. Sometimes it’s a memory issue: I simply can’t recall the relevant details. But just as often, as I grasp about, I’ll realize I had never really understood the idea in question, though I’d certainly thought I understood when I read the book. Indeed, I’ll realize that I had barely noticed how little I’d absorbed until that very moment.
I know I’m not alone here. When I share this observation with others—even others, like myself, who take learning seriously—it seems that everyone has had a similar experience. The conversation often feels confessional: there’s some bashfulness, almost as if these lapses reveal some unusual character flaw. I don’t think it’s a character flaw, but whatever it is, it’s certainly not unusual. In fact, I suspect this is the default experience for most readers. The situation only feels embarrassing because it’s hard to see how common it is.
Now, the books I named aren’t small investments. Each takes around 6–9 hours to read. Adult American college graduates read 24 minutes a day on average, so a typical reader might spend much of a month with one of these books. Millions of people have read each of these books, so that’s tens of millions of hours spent. In exchange for all that time, how much knowledge was absorbed? How many people absorbed most of the knowledge the author intended to convey? Or even just what they intended to acquire? I suspect it’s a small minority
[...]
I’m not suggesting that all those hours were wasted. Many readers enjoyed reading those books. That’s wonderful! Certainly most readers absorbed something, however ineffable: points of view, ways of thinking, norms, inspiration, and so on. Indeed, for many books (and in particular most fiction), these effects are the point.
This essay is not about that kind of book. It’s about explanatory non-fiction like the books I mentioned above, which aim to convey detailed knowledge. Some people may have read Thinking, Fast and Slow for entertainment value, but in exchange for their tens of millions of collective hours, I suspect many readers—or maybe even most readers—expected to walk away with more. Why else would we feel so startled when we notice how little we’ve absorbed from something we’ve read?
All this suggests a peculiar conclusion: as a medium, books are surprisingly bad at conveying knowledge, and readers mostly don’t realize it.
[...]
Why lectures don’t work
We’ve been discussing books so far, but have you ever had the same type of experience with a lecture? It’s easy to attend a lecture and feel that you understand, only to discover over that night’s problem set that you understood very little. Memory feels partly to blame: you might sense that you knew certain details at one time, but you’ve forgotten. Yet we can’t pin this all on memory. When you pull on certain strings from the lecture, you might discover that you had never really understood, though you’d certainly thought you understood during the lecture.
[...]
Like books, lectures can be entertaining or influential; like books, lectures do seem to work… sometimes, for some people. But you probably don’t believe that lectures are a reliable way to convey knowledge.
Books don’t work for the same reason that lectures don’t work: neither medium has any explicit theory of how people actually learn things, and as a result, both mediums accidentally (and mostly invisibly) evolved around a theory that’s plainly false.
To illustrate what I mean, I’ll try to draw on your own learning experiences. You’ve probably discovered that certain strategies help you absorb new ideas: solving interesting problems, writing chapter summaries, doing creative projects, etc. Whatever strategies you prefer, they’re not magic. There’s a reason they work (when they do): they’re leveraging some underlying truth about your cognition—about the way you think and learn. In many cases, the truth is not just about your cognition but about human cognition in general.
If we collect enough of these underlying “truths,” some shared themes might emerge, suggesting a more coherent theory of how learning happens. We’ll call such theories cognitive models. Some learning strategies suggest the same model; others suggest conflicting models. Some of these models are empirically testable; others aren’t; still others are already known to be false. By focusing on these models, instead of a herd of one-off strategies, we can seek more general implications. We can ask: if we take a particular cognitive model seriously, what does it suggest will (or won’t) help us understand something?
That’s an important question because it’s hard to convey knowledge. Most lecture attendees don’t absorb the intended knowledge; most book readers don’t absorb the intended knowledge. Failure is the default here. So if you hope to help others understand things, you had better draw on some great ideas about how people learn. It would be nice if this weren’t true. It would be nice if one could simply explain an idea clearly to someone, then trust that they’ve understood it. Unfortunately, as you’ve likely seen in classrooms and in your own life, complex ideas are rarely understood so automatically.
Lectures, as a medium, have no carefully-considered cognitive model at their foundation. Yet if we were aliens observing typical lectures from afar, we might notice the implicit model they appear to share: “the lecturer says words describing an idea; the class hears the words and maybe scribbles in a notebook; then the class understands the idea.” In learning sciences, we call this model “transmissionism.” It’s the notion that knowledge can be directly transmitted from teacher to student, like transcribing text from one page onto another. If only! The idea is so thoroughly discredited that “transmissionism” is only used pejoratively [...].
Of course, good lecturers don’t usually believe that simply telling their audience about an idea causes them to understand it. It’s just that lectures, as a format, are shaped as if that were true, so lecturers mostly behave as if it were true.
If pressed, many lecturers would offer a more plausible cognitive model: understanding actually comes after the lecture, when attendees solve problem sets, write essays, etc. The lecture provides the raw information for those later activities. Great: that’s a real model, and parts of it are supported by cognitive science. But if we’d begun with this model, would we have chosen live, ninety-minute speeches to convey raw information for a problem set?
Listeners’ attention wanders after a few minutes, so wouldn’t we want to interleave the problem-solving sessions with the lecture? Live speeches can’t be paused or rewound, so aren’t they awfully lossy for conveying raw information? People can read much more quickly than a lecturer speaks, so wouldn’t text be more efficient? And so on—it’s already clear that the traditional lecture format isn’t particularly informed by this model.
The lectures-as-warmup model is a post-hoc rationalization, but it does gesture at a deep theory about cognition: to understand something, you must actively engage with it. That notion, taken seriously, would utterly transform classrooms. We’d prioritize activities like interactive discussions and projects; we’d deploy direct instruction only when it’s the best way to enable those activities. [...]
In summary: lectures don’t work because the medium lacks a functioning cognitive model. It’s (implicitly) built on a faulty idea about how people learn—transmissionism—which we can caricaturize as “lecturer says words describing an idea; students hear words; then they understand.” When lectures do work, it’s generally as part of a broader learning context (e.g. projects, problem sets) with a better cognitive model. But the lectures aren’t pulling their weight. If we really wanted to adopt the better model, we’d ditch the lectures, and indeed, that’s what’s been happening in US K–12 education.
[...]
Cryptoassets, DLT and smart contracts – UK Jurisdiction Taskforce consultation. Questions to be addressed in the Legal Statement
Cryptoassets, DLT and smart contracts – UK Jurisdiction Taskforce consultation, Annex 1. May 9 2019, https://www.lawsociety.org.uk/news/documents/ukjt-consultation-cryptoassets-smart-contracts-may-2019/
Annex 1
Questions to be addressed in the Legal Statement
Each of the following questions is posed as a matter of English law.
1 Legal status of cryptoassets
1.1 Principal question
Under what circumstances, if any, would the following be characterised as personal property:
1.1.1 a cryptoasset; and
1.1.2 a private key 10?
1.2 Ancillary questions
General law
1.2.1 If a cryptoasset is capable of being property:
(i) is that as a chose in possession, a chose in action or another form of personal property?
(ii) how is title to that property capable of being transferred?
1.2.2 Is a cryptoasset capable of being the object of a bailment?
1.2.3 What factors would be relevant in determining whether English law governs the proprietary aspects of dealings in cryptoassets?
Security
1.2.4 Can security validly be granted over a cryptoasset and, if so, how?
1.2.5 If so, what forms of security may validly be granted over a cryptoasset?
Insolvency
1.2.6 Can a cryptoasset be characterised as “property” for the purposes of the Insolvency Act 1986?
Transferability and negotiability
Under what circumstances, if any, would a cryptoasset be characterised as:
1.2.7 a documentary intangible;
1.2.8 a document of title;
1.2.9 negotiable 11; or
1.2.10 an “instrument” under the Bills of Exchange Act 1882?
Goods
1.2.11 Can cryptoassets be characterised as “goods” under the Sale of Goods Act 1979?
Register
1.2.12 In what circumstances is a distributed ledger capable of amounting to a register for the purposes of evidencing, constituting and transferring title to assets?
2 Enforceability of smart contracts
2.1 Principal question
In what circumstances is a smart contract capable of giving rise to binding legal obligations, enforceable in accordance with its terms (a “smart legal contract”)?
2.2 Ancillary questions
2.2.1 How would an English court apply general principles of contractual interpretation to a smart contract written wholly or in part in computer code?
2.2.2 Under what circumstances would an English court look beyond the mere outcome of the running of any computer code that is or is part of a smart contract in determining the agreement between the parties?
2.2.3 Is a smart contract between anonymous or pseudo-anonymous parties capable of giving rise to binding legal obligations?
2.2.4 Could a statutory signature requirement 12 be met by using a private key?
2.2.5 Could a statutory “in writing” requirement be met in the case of a smart contract composed partly or wholly of computer code?
Notes
10 To the extent it is considered as distinct from the relevant “cryptoasset”.
11 In the sense that a transferee may, by its mere transfer, acquire better title than that of its transferor.
12 For example, in the context of a disposition of an equitable interest (under s53(1)(c) Law of Property Act 1925 (LPA)) or of a legal assignment (under s136(1) LPA)?
Annex 1
Questions to be addressed in the Legal Statement
Each of the following questions is posed as a matter of English law.
1 Legal status of cryptoassets
1.1 Principal question
Under what circumstances, if any, would the following be characterised as personal property:
1.1.1 a cryptoasset; and
1.1.2 a private key 10?
1.2 Ancillary questions
General law
1.2.1 If a cryptoasset is capable of being property:
(i) is that as a chose in possession, a chose in action or another form of personal property?
(ii) how is title to that property capable of being transferred?
1.2.2 Is a cryptoasset capable of being the object of a bailment?
1.2.3 What factors would be relevant in determining whether English law governs the proprietary aspects of dealings in cryptoassets?
Security
1.2.4 Can security validly be granted over a cryptoasset and, if so, how?
1.2.5 If so, what forms of security may validly be granted over a cryptoasset?
Insolvency
1.2.6 Can a cryptoasset be characterised as “property” for the purposes of the Insolvency Act 1986?
Transferability and negotiability
Under what circumstances, if any, would a cryptoasset be characterised as:
1.2.7 a documentary intangible;
1.2.8 a document of title;
1.2.9 negotiable 11; or
1.2.10 an “instrument” under the Bills of Exchange Act 1882?
Goods
1.2.11 Can cryptoassets be characterised as “goods” under the Sale of Goods Act 1979?
Register
1.2.12 In what circumstances is a distributed ledger capable of amounting to a register for the purposes of evidencing, constituting and transferring title to assets?
2 Enforceability of smart contracts
2.1 Principal question
In what circumstances is a smart contract capable of giving rise to binding legal obligations, enforceable in accordance with its terms (a “smart legal contract”)?
2.2 Ancillary questions
2.2.1 How would an English court apply general principles of contractual interpretation to a smart contract written wholly or in part in computer code?
2.2.2 Under what circumstances would an English court look beyond the mere outcome of the running of any computer code that is or is part of a smart contract in determining the agreement between the parties?
2.2.3 Is a smart contract between anonymous or pseudo-anonymous parties capable of giving rise to binding legal obligations?
2.2.4 Could a statutory signature requirement 12 be met by using a private key?
2.2.5 Could a statutory “in writing” requirement be met in the case of a smart contract composed partly or wholly of computer code?
Notes
10 To the extent it is considered as distinct from the relevant “cryptoasset”.
11 In the sense that a transferee may, by its mere transfer, acquire better title than that of its transferor.
12 For example, in the context of a disposition of an equitable interest (under s53(1)(c) Law of Property Act 1925 (LPA)) or of a legal assignment (under s136(1) LPA)?
Relationships are a complicated dance of empathy, understanding, compatibility, & effort. Ultimatums don't work. Jealousy doesn't work. Lying doesn't work
How Being A Mistress Changed My Perception Of Marriage. Michelle Zunter. Medium, Jan 5 2019. https://medium.com/@michellezunter/how-being-a-mistress-changed-my-perception-of-marriage-510865415782 (original piece in HuffPost 2016!)
It takes two. It's give and take. It's all about commitment. Those are a few of the slogans I've heard people use in regards to relationships and marriage.
While I agree that all of those things may be important and true, sometimes we fall short in keeping up with those standards.
I never considered myself to be the type of person who would fall short at anything that really mattered to me. I had integrity, I was loyal, and I was determined. Then -- life happened.
By my late twenties I was already divorced. The relationship had been an abusive one and it took me years to extract myself from it. After the divorce was over with and I had moved away from my ex-husband, things felt as if they were finally getting back on track. I had a great job, I didn't have children. [...]
And then I slipped.
I did something I had judged others for doing in the past and something that I had always said I would never do.
I had an affair with someone who was married.
The person I did this with was a repeat offender in the cheating department. They had no visible qualms about it. I was in way over my head. My judgement at the time was obviously questionable [...].
While recovering from one destructive relationship, I ended up jumping straight into another. Much of my hope about the validity of a healthy, long-lasting relationship had disintegrated and -- fittingly -- I found someone who didn't even respect their own marriage. By entering into this affair, I effectively participated in the erosion of another marriage.
[...] I learned how easy it can be for people to betray those who love them. I learned how a lie can become a convoluted web of unmanageable anxiety. I learned what it feels like to not love yourself.
The experience of an affair really makes you wonder about all relationships and marriages. It makes you wonder about the secrets people potentially keep, the lies they tell, and the capacity of people in general to remain loyal to one another.
You realize how much effort it really takes to be in a successful, faithful marriage or long-term relationship. It takes guts and constant communication. It takes dealing with your issues and confronting your fears. It takes a great deal of love and respect after the initial passion is gone. And I don't mean love as in lust - but love as in I'm going to care for you, support you, and remain faithful to you even when you're being unlovable, annoying, or sick kind of love.
[...]
I spent several years alone after the affair. There was no dating and my sense of self was slaughtered. It's an experience that will drain you and leave you dry. Make no mistake - the beginning phase of an illicit affair may be very thrilling but this feeling will rapidly be replaced by stress, desperation, pain, and guilt.
Over time, I started loving myself and my body. I ate well. I worked out. I started to make my own happiness. I admitted what I had done and -- even though the darkness of it still disturbed me - [...]
There may be no way to tell if your partner is lying to you or cheating on you. There may be no way to know for sure that you will never commit an act that hurts your partner or anyone else --even when you believe you never would.
are a complicated dance of empathy, understanding, compatibility, and effort. Ultimatums don't work. Jealousy doesn't work. Lying doesn't work. Know yourself before you expect someone else to know you. Love yourself. Be prepared to forgive things that you would want your partner to forgive you for. Know what youcan'tforgive and don't expect it in return.
Marriage can be a beautiful partnership and journey. One of the biggest lessons I learned by turning my back on the idea of marriage all those years ago, is that marriage is still sacred and it is still a big deal.
[...]
It takes two. It's give and take. It's all about commitment. Those are a few of the slogans I've heard people use in regards to relationships and marriage.
While I agree that all of those things may be important and true, sometimes we fall short in keeping up with those standards.
I never considered myself to be the type of person who would fall short at anything that really mattered to me. I had integrity, I was loyal, and I was determined. Then -- life happened.
By my late twenties I was already divorced. The relationship had been an abusive one and it took me years to extract myself from it. After the divorce was over with and I had moved away from my ex-husband, things felt as if they were finally getting back on track. I had a great job, I didn't have children. [...]
And then I slipped.
I did something I had judged others for doing in the past and something that I had always said I would never do.
I had an affair with someone who was married.
The person I did this with was a repeat offender in the cheating department. They had no visible qualms about it. I was in way over my head. My judgement at the time was obviously questionable [...].
While recovering from one destructive relationship, I ended up jumping straight into another. Much of my hope about the validity of a healthy, long-lasting relationship had disintegrated and -- fittingly -- I found someone who didn't even respect their own marriage. By entering into this affair, I effectively participated in the erosion of another marriage.
[...] I learned how easy it can be for people to betray those who love them. I learned how a lie can become a convoluted web of unmanageable anxiety. I learned what it feels like to not love yourself.
The experience of an affair really makes you wonder about all relationships and marriages. It makes you wonder about the secrets people potentially keep, the lies they tell, and the capacity of people in general to remain loyal to one another.
You realize how much effort it really takes to be in a successful, faithful marriage or long-term relationship. It takes guts and constant communication. It takes dealing with your issues and confronting your fears. It takes a great deal of love and respect after the initial passion is gone. And I don't mean love as in lust - but love as in I'm going to care for you, support you, and remain faithful to you even when you're being unlovable, annoying, or sick kind of love.
[...]
I spent several years alone after the affair. There was no dating and my sense of self was slaughtered. It's an experience that will drain you and leave you dry. Make no mistake - the beginning phase of an illicit affair may be very thrilling but this feeling will rapidly be replaced by stress, desperation, pain, and guilt.
Over time, I started loving myself and my body. I ate well. I worked out. I started to make my own happiness. I admitted what I had done and -- even though the darkness of it still disturbed me - [...]
There may be no way to tell if your partner is lying to you or cheating on you. There may be no way to know for sure that you will never commit an act that hurts your partner or anyone else --even when you believe you never would.
are a complicated dance of empathy, understanding, compatibility, and effort. Ultimatums don't work. Jealousy doesn't work. Lying doesn't work. Know yourself before you expect someone else to know you. Love yourself. Be prepared to forgive things that you would want your partner to forgive you for. Know what youcan'tforgive and don't expect it in return.
Marriage can be a beautiful partnership and journey. One of the biggest lessons I learned by turning my back on the idea of marriage all those years ago, is that marriage is still sacred and it is still a big deal.
[...]
Saturday, May 11, 2019
More than a single true self-concept, people have multiple nonfalse ones, none of which is entirely true; the pragmatically most important one is the desired reputation, more a guide and goal than a reality
Stalking the True Self Through the Jungles of Authenticity: Problems, Contradictions, Inconsistencies, Disturbing Findings—and a Possible Way Forward. Roy F. Baumeister. Review of General Psychology, April 26, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1177/1089268019829472
Abstract: Research on authenticity frequently invokes notions of true self, but is there such thing? The question must be answered twice, given frequent confusion and conflation of self with self-concept. Summarizing and integrating themes from authenticity research as evident in this special issue, I draw these conclusions. True self-concepts are more plausible than genuinely true selves, if the latter are independent entities distinct from actual behavior and experience. Yet rather than a single true self-concept, people have multiple nonfalse ones, none of which is entirely true. Among these, the pragmatically most important is the desired reputation, given the social-cultural orientation of humankind. Desired reputation is more a guide and goal than a reality, but successes and failures at achieving that reputation will produce welcome and unwelcome feelings that are likely reported as feeling authentic and inauthentic (respectively). Understanding authenticity in this way solves some of the perennial problems that beset research and theory on authenticity, especially positive distortion and external rather than internal orientation.
Keywords: true self, self, authenticity, self-knowledge, reputation
Abstract: Research on authenticity frequently invokes notions of true self, but is there such thing? The question must be answered twice, given frequent confusion and conflation of self with self-concept. Summarizing and integrating themes from authenticity research as evident in this special issue, I draw these conclusions. True self-concepts are more plausible than genuinely true selves, if the latter are independent entities distinct from actual behavior and experience. Yet rather than a single true self-concept, people have multiple nonfalse ones, none of which is entirely true. Among these, the pragmatically most important is the desired reputation, given the social-cultural orientation of humankind. Desired reputation is more a guide and goal than a reality, but successes and failures at achieving that reputation will produce welcome and unwelcome feelings that are likely reported as feeling authentic and inauthentic (respectively). Understanding authenticity in this way solves some of the perennial problems that beset research and theory on authenticity, especially positive distortion and external rather than internal orientation.
Keywords: true self, self, authenticity, self-knowledge, reputation
Neuromyths are prevalent and independent of the knowledge of the human brain at the beginning of teacher education
Neuromyths are prevalent and independent of the knowledge of the human brain at the beginning of teacher education. Georg Krammer, Stephan E. Vogel, Tugba Yardimci, Roland H. Grabner. Zeitschrift für Bildungsforschung, Apr 8 2019. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s35834-019-00238-2
Abstract: Transferring neuroscientific insights into education has created misconceptions of the human brain, i. e. neuromyths. Studies suggest that neuromyths are widely spread among teachers world-wide. However, it is unclear whether neuromyths already exist at the beginning of teacher education and whether they have a similar prevalence in Austria compared to other countries. The aim of the present study is to address these questions. In addition, this study aims to scrutinize the relationship between knowledge about the human brain and believing in neuromyths. 582 Austrian teacher education students responded to 40 statements of the human brain. Of these 40 statements, 20 were neuromyths and 20 were correct statements about the brain, i. e. neurofacts. Results showed that some neuromyths have a high prevalence already at the beginning of teacher education. Similar to previous findings in other countries, the most widely believed neuromyths were related to learning styles and to a disjoint functioning of the brain hemispheres. Furthermore, neuromyths did not form a unidimensional factor, as assumed—but not tested—by prior studies. Finally, results suggest that the knowledge about the human brain was not related to believing in neuromyths. To summarize, neuromyths are already prevalent at the beginning of teacher education. Teacher education should therefore take care to dispel these neuromyths by addressing neuromyths directly instead of only fostering general knowledge about the human brain. This holds particularly true for those neuromyths that could be potentially harmful when implemented in educational practices.
Keywords: Neuromyths Prevalence Teacher education Neurofacts Factorial structure
Abstract: Transferring neuroscientific insights into education has created misconceptions of the human brain, i. e. neuromyths. Studies suggest that neuromyths are widely spread among teachers world-wide. However, it is unclear whether neuromyths already exist at the beginning of teacher education and whether they have a similar prevalence in Austria compared to other countries. The aim of the present study is to address these questions. In addition, this study aims to scrutinize the relationship between knowledge about the human brain and believing in neuromyths. 582 Austrian teacher education students responded to 40 statements of the human brain. Of these 40 statements, 20 were neuromyths and 20 were correct statements about the brain, i. e. neurofacts. Results showed that some neuromyths have a high prevalence already at the beginning of teacher education. Similar to previous findings in other countries, the most widely believed neuromyths were related to learning styles and to a disjoint functioning of the brain hemispheres. Furthermore, neuromyths did not form a unidimensional factor, as assumed—but not tested—by prior studies. Finally, results suggest that the knowledge about the human brain was not related to believing in neuromyths. To summarize, neuromyths are already prevalent at the beginning of teacher education. Teacher education should therefore take care to dispel these neuromyths by addressing neuromyths directly instead of only fostering general knowledge about the human brain. This holds particularly true for those neuromyths that could be potentially harmful when implemented in educational practices.
Keywords: Neuromyths Prevalence Teacher education Neurofacts Factorial structure
Differences in Gaze Behavior Toward Women and Gynoid Robots: Non-human sexualized representations evoked a higher need for visual exploration
There’s More to Humanity Than Meets the Eye: Differences in Gaze Behavior Toward Women and Gynoid Robots. Jessica M. Szczuka, Nicole C. Krämer. Front. Psychol., April 24 2019. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00693
Abstract: Based on evolutionary psychological theories, numerous eye-tracking studies have demonstrated how people visually perceive a potential mate in order to efficiently estimate the person’s mate value. Companies are currently working on sexualized robots that provide numerous human-like visual cues which foster the visual resemblance to humans. To gain more elaborated knowledge on how people react to sexualized robots compared with humans, the present study empirically investigated whether heterosexual males transfer deep-rooted evolutionary psychological processes of mate perception to human-like and machine-like sexualized robots. Moreover, we aimed to learn more about the processes of orienting responses toward human and non-human stimuli and about potential predictors of visual attention to robots. Therefore, we conducted an eye-tracking study in which 15 heterosexual men, 12 homosexual men, and 18 heterosexual women were confronted with stimuli showing women, human-like gynoid robots and machine-like gynoid robots. For the sample as a whole, there was no difference in the amount of time spent looking at the human and non-human breasts. However, the results for the heterosexual males supported the assumption that human breasts attract more visual attention than do the breast areas of human-like and machine-like robots. The pelvic region yielded an unexpected gaze pattern, as all participants spent more time looking at the robotic pelvic area than at the human one, with more visual attention paid to the machine-like robots than to the human-like robots. The results of the viewing times toward the head revealed that all participants had a stronger need to gain visual information about the human head in comparison to the robotic heads, underlining the importance of authenticity in terms of emotions and motivations that can only be decoded in humans. Moreover, the study showed that individuals more frequently switched their visual attention toward different body parts of the robots in comparison to the female stimuli, implying that non-human sexualized representations evoked a higher need for visual exploration.
Introduction
The statement “Mating is a human universal” (Buss and Schmitt, 1993) not only implies that almost every human being, due to hormonal events and sociocultural influences, starts to develop sexual interest in women or men during adolescence (Miller and Benson, 1999), but also emphasizes the importance of mating for reproduction and evolution. To enable optimally successful reproduction, humans have therefore developed strategies to effectively estimate a person’s mate quality by looking at information provided by the person’s body (Buss, 1999). Consequently, studying eye movement patterns when people are looking at a potential mate has become an important research area in the field of human mating behavior. Results of numerous eye-tracking studies with heterosexual men highlight the visual importance of the female head, the chest and the pelvic region, since these body parts provide information about a woman’s reproductive value (e.g., Nummenmaa et al., 2012).
While the shape of the female body has been of aesthetic interest for centuries, it now also serves as a paragon for robots. Robots are machines which are built for specific reasons, ranging from work tasks in which they act autonomously and without human contact (e.g., industrial robots or robots which inspect and defuse explosive devices) to fields of application in which robots are built to have physiological and psychological contact with humans (e.g., robots in healthcare; Dautenhahn, 2007). In line with technological developments that are shaped to fulfill sexual needs (Allen, 2000) for example internet applications, VR technology), there have also been first attempts to develop robots that engage in intimate interactions with users. Companies (such as Abyss Creations/Realbotix) are currently developing human-like robots that are made to fulfill sexual needs by equipping hyper-realistic sex dolls with motors for movement and with a database providing the possibility to interact verbally. In his seminal book, David Levy (2008) predicted that by 2050, people will not only have sex with robots on a regular basis, but will also have relationships with and even marry robots. Levy highlighted that a prerequisite for these developments is that robots are “like us” with regard to their behavior and appearance.
This raises the question of whether people will use the same deep-rooted evolutionary psychological mechanisms of mating with a robotic replication of a human being, or whether mating with a robot will lead to new forms of information processing. As processes of visual attention have been shown to be influenced by the way people perceive a potential partner (e.g., Buss, 1999; Nummenmaa et al., 2012; see section “Visual Information on the Female Body and Its Perception” for details), we aimed to empirically investigate processes of visual attention to women and to female-looking. robots. According to evolutionary psychological approaches, it would be useless to process the human body and the mechanical body in the same way, because a mechanical body does not provide any authentic information about health, age, motivation, emotion, and consequently reproductive value (see section “Visual Information on the Female Body and Its Perception” for details). However, given that the mechanisms of mating are deeply rooted in humans (Buss, 1999), it is conceivable that the female-looking shape of the robotic female body is sufficient to trigger unconscious processes of visual attention that are similar to the way men look at women.
Based on these considerations, the present study asks whether heterosexual men apply the same gaze behavior toward female-looking robots as toward women. The implicit measurement of eye tracking enables unbiased insights into the visual attention toward women and sexualized robots, as it is not influenced by social desirability, which is particularly important given that the theme of sex robots might lead to biased reactions. Garza et al. (2016), who themselves conducted an eye-tracking study on the perception of the female body, highlight why eye tracking is useful in this research area by stating that “Eye movements provide a ‘true’ measure because they reflect ongoing mental processes in real time, whereas ratings are typically ‘post hoc’ processes that rely more on problem solving strategies” (p. 14). Moreover, we are interested in whether the robots’ appearance, in terms of how human-like or machine-like they look, influences gaze patterns. Additionally, we examined whether this would influence people’s visual attention insofar as unusual aspects would lead to more detailed exploration. As sexual interactions with inanimate objects like robots deviate from sexual norms (Abramson and Pinkerton, 1995; Worthen, 2016), responses to explicit measurements are likely to be influenced by social desirability and reflections on societal and sexual norm adherence. This problem can be avoided by using eye tracking to measure eye movements, as studies have found that eye movements quantify visual attention without an influence of social desirability. For instance, an empirical study by Fromberger et al. (2012) indicated that it is possible to determine a person’s sexual orientation based on gaze pattern, which in the case of explicit measurements may also be influenced by processes of social desirability. The present study therefore aims to contribute unbiased empirical data regarding men’s initial reactions to robotic replications of women. To further scrutinize whether evolutionary aspects play a role, in the sense that gaze patterns are caused by the unconscious intention to check for mate value, we included heterosexual women and homosexual men as control groups. Furthermore, we assessed different personality traits as well as participants’ evaluations of the robots (including ratings of attractiveness) in order to examine their potential explanatory power regarding the amount of time participants spend looking at different body regions of the robots. Overall, the present study aims to provide further insights into how sexualized robots are perceived in contrast to women. As such, the work contribute to the discussion on sexualized robots, which has so far primarily been based on the work of scholars who discuss normative questions (Levy, 2008; Richardson, 2016).
Abstract: Based on evolutionary psychological theories, numerous eye-tracking studies have demonstrated how people visually perceive a potential mate in order to efficiently estimate the person’s mate value. Companies are currently working on sexualized robots that provide numerous human-like visual cues which foster the visual resemblance to humans. To gain more elaborated knowledge on how people react to sexualized robots compared with humans, the present study empirically investigated whether heterosexual males transfer deep-rooted evolutionary psychological processes of mate perception to human-like and machine-like sexualized robots. Moreover, we aimed to learn more about the processes of orienting responses toward human and non-human stimuli and about potential predictors of visual attention to robots. Therefore, we conducted an eye-tracking study in which 15 heterosexual men, 12 homosexual men, and 18 heterosexual women were confronted with stimuli showing women, human-like gynoid robots and machine-like gynoid robots. For the sample as a whole, there was no difference in the amount of time spent looking at the human and non-human breasts. However, the results for the heterosexual males supported the assumption that human breasts attract more visual attention than do the breast areas of human-like and machine-like robots. The pelvic region yielded an unexpected gaze pattern, as all participants spent more time looking at the robotic pelvic area than at the human one, with more visual attention paid to the machine-like robots than to the human-like robots. The results of the viewing times toward the head revealed that all participants had a stronger need to gain visual information about the human head in comparison to the robotic heads, underlining the importance of authenticity in terms of emotions and motivations that can only be decoded in humans. Moreover, the study showed that individuals more frequently switched their visual attention toward different body parts of the robots in comparison to the female stimuli, implying that non-human sexualized representations evoked a higher need for visual exploration.
Introduction
The statement “Mating is a human universal” (Buss and Schmitt, 1993) not only implies that almost every human being, due to hormonal events and sociocultural influences, starts to develop sexual interest in women or men during adolescence (Miller and Benson, 1999), but also emphasizes the importance of mating for reproduction and evolution. To enable optimally successful reproduction, humans have therefore developed strategies to effectively estimate a person’s mate quality by looking at information provided by the person’s body (Buss, 1999). Consequently, studying eye movement patterns when people are looking at a potential mate has become an important research area in the field of human mating behavior. Results of numerous eye-tracking studies with heterosexual men highlight the visual importance of the female head, the chest and the pelvic region, since these body parts provide information about a woman’s reproductive value (e.g., Nummenmaa et al., 2012).
While the shape of the female body has been of aesthetic interest for centuries, it now also serves as a paragon for robots. Robots are machines which are built for specific reasons, ranging from work tasks in which they act autonomously and without human contact (e.g., industrial robots or robots which inspect and defuse explosive devices) to fields of application in which robots are built to have physiological and psychological contact with humans (e.g., robots in healthcare; Dautenhahn, 2007). In line with technological developments that are shaped to fulfill sexual needs (Allen, 2000) for example internet applications, VR technology), there have also been first attempts to develop robots that engage in intimate interactions with users. Companies (such as Abyss Creations/Realbotix) are currently developing human-like robots that are made to fulfill sexual needs by equipping hyper-realistic sex dolls with motors for movement and with a database providing the possibility to interact verbally. In his seminal book, David Levy (2008) predicted that by 2050, people will not only have sex with robots on a regular basis, but will also have relationships with and even marry robots. Levy highlighted that a prerequisite for these developments is that robots are “like us” with regard to their behavior and appearance.
This raises the question of whether people will use the same deep-rooted evolutionary psychological mechanisms of mating with a robotic replication of a human being, or whether mating with a robot will lead to new forms of information processing. As processes of visual attention have been shown to be influenced by the way people perceive a potential partner (e.g., Buss, 1999; Nummenmaa et al., 2012; see section “Visual Information on the Female Body and Its Perception” for details), we aimed to empirically investigate processes of visual attention to women and to female-looking. robots. According to evolutionary psychological approaches, it would be useless to process the human body and the mechanical body in the same way, because a mechanical body does not provide any authentic information about health, age, motivation, emotion, and consequently reproductive value (see section “Visual Information on the Female Body and Its Perception” for details). However, given that the mechanisms of mating are deeply rooted in humans (Buss, 1999), it is conceivable that the female-looking shape of the robotic female body is sufficient to trigger unconscious processes of visual attention that are similar to the way men look at women.
Based on these considerations, the present study asks whether heterosexual men apply the same gaze behavior toward female-looking robots as toward women. The implicit measurement of eye tracking enables unbiased insights into the visual attention toward women and sexualized robots, as it is not influenced by social desirability, which is particularly important given that the theme of sex robots might lead to biased reactions. Garza et al. (2016), who themselves conducted an eye-tracking study on the perception of the female body, highlight why eye tracking is useful in this research area by stating that “Eye movements provide a ‘true’ measure because they reflect ongoing mental processes in real time, whereas ratings are typically ‘post hoc’ processes that rely more on problem solving strategies” (p. 14). Moreover, we are interested in whether the robots’ appearance, in terms of how human-like or machine-like they look, influences gaze patterns. Additionally, we examined whether this would influence people’s visual attention insofar as unusual aspects would lead to more detailed exploration. As sexual interactions with inanimate objects like robots deviate from sexual norms (Abramson and Pinkerton, 1995; Worthen, 2016), responses to explicit measurements are likely to be influenced by social desirability and reflections on societal and sexual norm adherence. This problem can be avoided by using eye tracking to measure eye movements, as studies have found that eye movements quantify visual attention without an influence of social desirability. For instance, an empirical study by Fromberger et al. (2012) indicated that it is possible to determine a person’s sexual orientation based on gaze pattern, which in the case of explicit measurements may also be influenced by processes of social desirability. The present study therefore aims to contribute unbiased empirical data regarding men’s initial reactions to robotic replications of women. To further scrutinize whether evolutionary aspects play a role, in the sense that gaze patterns are caused by the unconscious intention to check for mate value, we included heterosexual women and homosexual men as control groups. Furthermore, we assessed different personality traits as well as participants’ evaluations of the robots (including ratings of attractiveness) in order to examine their potential explanatory power regarding the amount of time participants spend looking at different body regions of the robots. Overall, the present study aims to provide further insights into how sexualized robots are perceived in contrast to women. As such, the work contribute to the discussion on sexualized robots, which has so far primarily been based on the work of scholars who discuss normative questions (Levy, 2008; Richardson, 2016).
Great apes have an aversion to a restricted range of core pathogen sources that they share with humans; this extends beyond distaste to resemble a muted form of disgust, long thought to be unique to humans
The Animal Origins of Disgust Reports of Basic Disgust in Nonhuman Great Apes. April 2019. Trevor I. Case, Richard J Stevenson, Richard W Byrne, Catherine Hobaiter. Pre-print, DOI: 10.1037/ebs0000175
Abstract: Intrinsic to an evolved disease avoidance account of disgust is Darwin’s assumption of continuity between the emotional lives of humans and animals. However, beyond the case of avoiding stimuli that taste bad, there has been little exploration of the existence of basic disgust elicitors in animals. Moreover, one influential perspective holds that disgust is unique to humans-a preadaptation of distaste that expands through culture to include a wide range of elicitors (e.g., Rozin, 2015). The present study represents a broad-scope investigation into disgust-like responses that might be present in nonhuman great ape species. A survey of aversions, contamination reactions, and signs of disgust in nonhuman great apes (principally chimpanzees) was collected from 74 great ape researchers, fieldworkers, and keepers. Overall, the results suggest that nonhuman great apes share with humans an aversion to a restricted range of core pathogen sources, which extends beyond distaste to resemble human disgust. However, in nonhuman great apes, this aversion is muted. Candidates for this difference between humans and other great apes are considered, including frequent exposure to basic disgust elicitors in nonhuman great apes and increased dependence on meat-eating in hominin ancestry. We suggest that differences in disgust–like behavior between humans and nonhuman great apes reflect the specific ecological standpoint of the animal and that rather than being unique to humans, disgust is a continuation of the armoury of disease avoidance behavior ubiquitous in animals.
Public significance statement: A systematic survey of great ape experts suggests that nonhuman great apes have an aversion to a restricted range of core pathogen sources that they share with humans. This extends beyond distaste to resemble a muted form of disgust. Long thought to be unique to humans, disgust is likely a continuation of the armoury of disease avoidance behavior ubiquitous in animals.
Keywords: Pathogen, Primate, Disease avoidance, Evolution, Aversions
Abstract: Intrinsic to an evolved disease avoidance account of disgust is Darwin’s assumption of continuity between the emotional lives of humans and animals. However, beyond the case of avoiding stimuli that taste bad, there has been little exploration of the existence of basic disgust elicitors in animals. Moreover, one influential perspective holds that disgust is unique to humans-a preadaptation of distaste that expands through culture to include a wide range of elicitors (e.g., Rozin, 2015). The present study represents a broad-scope investigation into disgust-like responses that might be present in nonhuman great ape species. A survey of aversions, contamination reactions, and signs of disgust in nonhuman great apes (principally chimpanzees) was collected from 74 great ape researchers, fieldworkers, and keepers. Overall, the results suggest that nonhuman great apes share with humans an aversion to a restricted range of core pathogen sources, which extends beyond distaste to resemble human disgust. However, in nonhuman great apes, this aversion is muted. Candidates for this difference between humans and other great apes are considered, including frequent exposure to basic disgust elicitors in nonhuman great apes and increased dependence on meat-eating in hominin ancestry. We suggest that differences in disgust–like behavior between humans and nonhuman great apes reflect the specific ecological standpoint of the animal and that rather than being unique to humans, disgust is a continuation of the armoury of disease avoidance behavior ubiquitous in animals.
Public significance statement: A systematic survey of great ape experts suggests that nonhuman great apes have an aversion to a restricted range of core pathogen sources that they share with humans. This extends beyond distaste to resemble a muted form of disgust. Long thought to be unique to humans, disgust is likely a continuation of the armoury of disease avoidance behavior ubiquitous in animals.
Keywords: Pathogen, Primate, Disease avoidance, Evolution, Aversions
Friday, May 10, 2019
Interest rate caps are widespread in credit markets; in Chile a 20pct lowering reduced the number of loans by 19%; consumer surplus decreased by 3.5% of average income (larger losses for risky borrowers)
Price Regulation in Credit Markets: A Trade-off between Consumer Protection and Credit Access. Jose I. Cuesta, Alberto Sepulveda. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_toHlf2fvvtckCSrSi-zmnsexNGcDqrK/view
Abstract: Interest rate caps are widespread in consumer credit markets, yet there is limited evidence on its effects on market outcomes and welfare. Conceptually, the effects of interest rate caps are ambiguous and depend on a trade-off between consumer protection from banks’ market power and reductions in credit access. We exploit a policy in Chile that lowered interest rate caps by 20 percentage points to understand its impacts. Using comprehensive individual-level administrative data, we document that the policy decreased transacted interest rates by 9%, but also reduced the number of loans by 19%. To estimate the welfare effects of this policy, we develop and estimate a model of loan applications, pricing, and repayment of loans. Consumer surplus decreases by an equivalent of 3.5% of average income, with larger losses for risky borrowers. Survey evidence suggests these welfare effects may be driven by decreased consumption smoothing and increased financial distress. Interest rate caps provide greater consumer protection in more concentrated markets, but welfare effects are negative even under a monopoly. Risk-based regulation reduces the adverse effects of interest rate caps, but does not eliminate them.
Abstract: Interest rate caps are widespread in consumer credit markets, yet there is limited evidence on its effects on market outcomes and welfare. Conceptually, the effects of interest rate caps are ambiguous and depend on a trade-off between consumer protection from banks’ market power and reductions in credit access. We exploit a policy in Chile that lowered interest rate caps by 20 percentage points to understand its impacts. Using comprehensive individual-level administrative data, we document that the policy decreased transacted interest rates by 9%, but also reduced the number of loans by 19%. To estimate the welfare effects of this policy, we develop and estimate a model of loan applications, pricing, and repayment of loans. Consumer surplus decreases by an equivalent of 3.5% of average income, with larger losses for risky borrowers. Survey evidence suggests these welfare effects may be driven by decreased consumption smoothing and increased financial distress. Interest rate caps provide greater consumer protection in more concentrated markets, but welfare effects are negative even under a monopoly. Risk-based regulation reduces the adverse effects of interest rate caps, but does not eliminate them.
The daily dose of digital inspiration 2: Encounters with eudaimonic memes, remembered topics, emotional and motivational effects with a focus on gender differences
The daily dose of digital inspiration 2: Themes and affective user responses to meaningful memes in social media. Diana Rieger, Christoph Klimmt. New Media & Society, April 17, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444819842875
Abstract: Recent work on eudaimonic media entertainment has demonstrated that not only movies carry meaningful or inspiring topics but also content that is usually uploaded online, such as YouTube videos or memes in social media. Although past research found beneficial effects of eudaimonic movies for psychosocial well-being and motivational intentions, the daily audience of eudaimonic online fare has not been investigated yet. This article reports first findings from a survey (N = 2777), representative of German Internet users. Specifically, it addresses the question of (daily) encounters with eudaimonic memes, remembered topics, emotional and motivational effects with a focus on gender differences. The results reveal that many social media users consume “small doses” of eudaimonic content on a regular basis and experience similar, yet weaker, emotional consequences of such exposure. These findings are discussed in light of eudaimonic entertainment and positive media psychology.
Keywords: Entertainment, eudaimonia, inspiration, memes, positive media psychology, social media
Abstract: Recent work on eudaimonic media entertainment has demonstrated that not only movies carry meaningful or inspiring topics but also content that is usually uploaded online, such as YouTube videos or memes in social media. Although past research found beneficial effects of eudaimonic movies for psychosocial well-being and motivational intentions, the daily audience of eudaimonic online fare has not been investigated yet. This article reports first findings from a survey (N = 2777), representative of German Internet users. Specifically, it addresses the question of (daily) encounters with eudaimonic memes, remembered topics, emotional and motivational effects with a focus on gender differences. The results reveal that many social media users consume “small doses” of eudaimonic content on a regular basis and experience similar, yet weaker, emotional consequences of such exposure. These findings are discussed in light of eudaimonic entertainment and positive media psychology.
Keywords: Entertainment, eudaimonia, inspiration, memes, positive media psychology, social media
Left-wingers are more skeptical & averse towards the very rich, which causes them to take the risk of punishing an honest high earner; although cheating is against the rules, rightists seem to want to review every case individually
Suspicious Success — Cheating, Inequality Acceptance, and Political Preferences. Felix Klimm. European Economic Review, May 10 2019. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.euroecorev.2019.04.008
Abstract: Supporters of left-wing parties typically place more emphasis on redistributive policies than right-wing voters. I investigate whether this difference in tolerating inequality is affected by suspicious success — achievements that may arise from cheating. Using a laboratory experiment, I exogenously vary cheating opportunities for stakeholders who work on a real effort task and earn money according to their self-reported performances. An impartial spectator is able to redistribute the earnings between the stakeholders, although it is not possible to detect cheating. I find that the opportunity to cheat leads to different views on whether to accept inequality. Left-wing spectators substantially reduce inequality when cheating is possible, while the treatment has no significant effect on choices of right-wing spectators. Since neither differences in beliefs nor differences in norms about cheating can explain this finding, it seems to be driven by a difference in redistributive preferences. These results suggest that views on redistribution will diverge even more once public awareness increases that inequality may be to a certain extent created by cheating.
---
My results complement the literature in several dimensions. First, in line with the literature on dishonesty (e.g., Abeler et al., forthcoming), I find that some subjects are cheating but not all of them to the full extent. Second, supporting the findings of Cappelen et al. (2016), the results of the Monitor treatment show that left-wing and right-wing supporters do not differ in their redistributive preferences when the sources of inequality are certain. Third, whereas Bortolotti et al. (2017) investigate a different experimental setupthanIdo(e.g.,cheating in the luck domain instead of performance cheating), they also document that suspicious success affects what people consider to be a fair distribution. In addition, subjects with different fairness views exhibit the same beliefs about cheating in their experiment. This is in line with my finding that cheating beliefs do not differ across political preferences.
One might think of several explanations for why left-wing spectators take a higher risk of redistributing away from an honest stakeholder than right-wing spectators. For instance, left-wingers might be more skeptical and averse towards the very rich in general, which causes them to take the risk of punishing an honest high earner. Alternatively, right-wingers typically put more emphasis on the rule of law than left-wingers and could therefore be more reluctant to judge somebody without having proof.24 Even though cheating is against the rules, right-wingers seem to want to review every case individually.
Abstract: Supporters of left-wing parties typically place more emphasis on redistributive policies than right-wing voters. I investigate whether this difference in tolerating inequality is affected by suspicious success — achievements that may arise from cheating. Using a laboratory experiment, I exogenously vary cheating opportunities for stakeholders who work on a real effort task and earn money according to their self-reported performances. An impartial spectator is able to redistribute the earnings between the stakeholders, although it is not possible to detect cheating. I find that the opportunity to cheat leads to different views on whether to accept inequality. Left-wing spectators substantially reduce inequality when cheating is possible, while the treatment has no significant effect on choices of right-wing spectators. Since neither differences in beliefs nor differences in norms about cheating can explain this finding, it seems to be driven by a difference in redistributive preferences. These results suggest that views on redistribution will diverge even more once public awareness increases that inequality may be to a certain extent created by cheating.
---
My results complement the literature in several dimensions. First, in line with the literature on dishonesty (e.g., Abeler et al., forthcoming), I find that some subjects are cheating but not all of them to the full extent. Second, supporting the findings of Cappelen et al. (2016), the results of the Monitor treatment show that left-wing and right-wing supporters do not differ in their redistributive preferences when the sources of inequality are certain. Third, whereas Bortolotti et al. (2017) investigate a different experimental setupthanIdo(e.g.,cheating in the luck domain instead of performance cheating), they also document that suspicious success affects what people consider to be a fair distribution. In addition, subjects with different fairness views exhibit the same beliefs about cheating in their experiment. This is in line with my finding that cheating beliefs do not differ across political preferences.
One might think of several explanations for why left-wing spectators take a higher risk of redistributing away from an honest stakeholder than right-wing spectators. For instance, left-wingers might be more skeptical and averse towards the very rich in general, which causes them to take the risk of punishing an honest high earner. Alternatively, right-wingers typically put more emphasis on the rule of law than left-wingers and could therefore be more reluctant to judge somebody without having proof.24 Even though cheating is against the rules, right-wingers seem to want to review every case individually.
Revolutionaries in societies that used 1/4 as much energy as we do thought communism right around the corner; let's get the abundance that matters (everyone be free to pursue learning, play, sport, amusement, companionship, & travel)
We cannot legislate and spend our way out of catastrophic global warming. Jasper Bernes. Commune, Spring 2019. https://communemag.com/between-the-devil-and-the-green-new-deal/
Check also Not only is animal-source food wrong, plant-source food is wrong too... Let's transition to house flies, funghi, mealworm beetles and algae:
Tzachor, A., Richards, C.E. & Holt, L. Future foods for risk-resilient diets. Nat Food (2021). May 13 2021. https://www.bipartisanalliance.com/2021/05/not-only-is-animal-source-food-wrong.html
From space, the Bayan Obo mine in China, where 70 percent of the world’s rare earth minerals are extracted and refined, almost looks like a painting. The paisleys of the radioactive tailings ponds, miles long, concentrate the hidden colors of the earth: mineral aquamarines and ochres of the sort a painter might employ to flatter the rulers of a dying empire.
To meet the demands of the Green New Deal, which proposes to convert the US economy to zero emissions, renewable power by 2030, there will be a lot more of these mines gouged into the crust of the earth. That’s because nearly every renewable energy source depends upon non-renewable and frequently hard-to-access minerals: solar panels use indium, turbines use neodymium, batteries use lithium, and all require kilotons of steel, tin, silver, and copper. The renewable-energy supply chain is a complicated hopscotch around the periodic table and around the world. To make a high-capacity solar panel, one might need copper (atomic number 29) from Chile, indium (49) from Australia, gallium (31) from China, and selenium (34) from Germany. Many of the most efficient, direct-drive wind turbines require a couple pounds of the rare-earth metal neodymium, and there’s 140 pounds of lithium in each Tesla.
[...]
It’s not clear we can even get enough of this stuff out of the ground, however, given the timeframe. Zero-emissions 2030 would mean mines producing now, not in five or ten years. The race to bring new supply online is likely to be ugly, in more ways than one, as slipshod producers scramble to cash in on the price bonanza, cutting every corner and setting up mines that are dangerous, unhealthy, and not particularly green. Mines require a massive outlay of investment up front, and they typically feature low return on investment, except during the sort of commodity boom we can expect a Green New Deal to produce. It can be a decade or more before the sources are developed, and another decade before they turn a profit.
Nor is it clear how much the fruits of these mines will help us decarbonize, if energy use keeps climbing. Just because a United States encrusted in solar panels releases no greenhouse gases, that doesn’t mean its technologies are carbon neutral. It takes energy to get those minerals out of the ground, energy to shape them into batteries and photovoltaic solar panels and giant rotors for windmills, energy to dispose of them when they wear out. Mines are worked, primarily, by gas-burning vehicles. The container ships that cross the world’s seas bearing the good freight of renewables burn so much fuel they are responsible for 3 percent of planetary emissions. Electric, plug-in motors for construction equipment and container ships are barely in the prototype stage. And what kind of massive battery would you need to get a container ship across the Pacific? Maybe a small nuclear reactor would be best?
Counting emissions within national boundaries, in other words, is like counting calories but only during breakfast and lunch. If going clean in the US makes other places more dirty, then you’ve got to add that to the ledger. The carbon sums are sure to be lower than they would be otherwise, but the reductions might not be as robust as thought, especially if producers desperate to cash in on the renewable jackpot do things as cheaply and quickly as possible, which for now means fossil fuels. On the other side, environmental remediation is costly in every way. Want to clean up those tailings ponds, bury the waste deep underground, keep the water table from being poisoned? You’re going to need motors and you’re probably going to burn oil.
Consolidating scientific opinion, the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report projects that biofuels are going to be used in these cases—for construction, for industry, and for transport, wherever motors can’t be easily electrified. Biofuels put carbon into the air, but it’s carbon that was already absorbed by growing plants, so the net emissions are zero. The problem is that growing biofuels requires land otherwise devoted to crops, or carbon-absorbing wilderness. They are among the least dense of power sources. You would need a dozen acres to fill the tank of a single intercontinental jet. Emissions are only the most prominent aspect of a broader ecological crisis. Human habitation, pasture and industry, branching through the remaining wilderness in the most profligate and destructive manner, has sent shockwaves through the plant and animal kingdoms. The mass die-off of insects, with populations decreasing by four-fifths in some areas, is one part of this. The insect world is very poorly understood, but scientists suspect these die-offs and extinction events are only partially attributable to climate change, with human land use and pesticides a major culprit. Of the two billion tons of animal mass on the planet, insects account for half. Pull the pillars of the insect world away, and the food chains collapse.
To replace current US energy consumption with renewables, you’d need to devote at least 25-50 percent of the US landmass to solar, wind, and biofuels, according to the estimates made by Vaclav Smil, the grand doyen of energy studies. Is there room for that and expanding human habitation? For that and pasture for a massive meat and dairy industry? For that and the forest we’d need to take carbon out of the air? Not if capitalism keeps doing the thing which it can’t not keep doing—grow. The law of capitalism is the law of more—more energy, more stuff, more materials. It introduces efficiencies only to more effectively despoil the planet. There is no solution to the climate crisis which leaves capitalism’s compulsions to growth intact. And this is what the Green New Deal, a term coined by that oily neoliberal, Thomas Friedman, doesn’t address. It thinks you can keep capitalism, keep growth, but remove the deleterious consequences. The death villages are here to tell you that you can’t. No roses will bloom on that bush.
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Miners in Chile, China, and Zambia will be digging in the earth for more than just the makings of fifty million solar panels and windmills, however, since the Green New Deal also proposes to rebuild the power grid in a more efficient form, to upgrade all buildings to the highest environmental standards, and lastly, to develop a low-carbon transportation infrastructure, based on electric vehicles and high-speed rail. This would involve, needless to say, a monumental deployment of carbon-intensive materials like concrete and steel. Trillions of dollars of raw materials would need to flow into the United States to be shaped into train tracks and electric cars. Schools and hospitals, too, since alongside these green initiatives, the GND proposes universal health care and free education, not to mention a living-wage jobs guarantee.
Nothing new in politics is ever truly and completely new, and so it’s as unsurprising that the Green New Deal hearkens back to the 1930s as it is that France’s gilet jaunes revive the corpse of the French Revolution and make it dance a jig below the Arc de Triomphe. We understand the present and future through the past. As Marx notes in The Eighteenth Brumaire, people “make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.” In order to make new forms of class struggle intelligible, their partisans look to the past, “borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.” The “new” of the Green New Deal must therefore express itself in language decidedly old, appealing to great-grandpa’s vanished workerism and the graphic style of WPA posters.
This costume-play can be progressive rather than regressive, insofar as it consists of “glorifying the new struggles, not of parodying the old; of magnifying the given task in the imagination, not recoiling from its solution in reality; of finding once more the spirit of revolution, not making its ghost walk again.” [...]
We would do well to keep these words in mind over the next decades, to avoid recoiling from real solutions and insisting on fantastic ones. The project of the Green New Deal is really nothing like the New Deal of the 1930s, except in the most superficial ways. The New Deal was a response to an immediate economic emergency, the Great Depression, and not a future climate catastrophe: its main goal was to restore growth to an economy that had shrunk by 50 percent and in which one out of every four people was unemployed. The goal of the New Deal was to get capitalism to do what it already wanted to do: put people to work, exploit them, and then sell them the products of their own labor. The state was necessary as a catalyst and a mediator, setting the right balance between profit and wages, chiefly by strengthening the hand of labor and weakening that of business. Aside from the fact that it involves capital outlays that are much larger, the Green New Deal has a more difficult ambition: rather than get capitalism to do what it wants to do, it has to get it to pursue a path that is certainly bad for the owners of capital in the long run.
Whereas the New Deal needed only to restore growth, the Green New Deal has to generate growth and reduce emissions. The problem is that growth and emissions are, by almost every measure, profoundly correlated. The Green New Deal thus risks becoming a sort of Sisyphean reform, rolling the rock of emissions reductions up the hill each day only to have a growing, energy-hungry economy knock it back down to the bottom each night.
Advocates of green growth promise an “absolute decoupling” of emissions and growth, where each additional unit of energy adds no CO2 to the atmosphere. Even if such a thing were technologically possible, even if it were possible to generate zero- or low-emissions energy not only adequate to but in excess of current demand, such decoupling would require far greater power over the behavior of capitalists than the New Deal ever mustered.
FDR and his coalition in Congress exerted modest control over corporations through a process of “countervailing power,” in the words of John Kenneth Galbraith, tilting the playing field to disempower capitalists relative to workers and consumers, and making new investment more appealing. The state did undertake direct investment—building roads, bridges, power stations, parks, and museums—but did so not in order to supplant private investment but to create “forever a yardstick against extortion,” in FDR’s high-toned phrasing. Government power plants would, for example, disclose the true (lower) price of electricity, barring energy monopolies from price gouging.
Green New Dealers flag this aspect of the New Deal, since it’s ostensibly so close to what they propose. The Tennessee Valley Authority, a public power company still in operation eighty years later, is the most famous of these projects. Public infrastructure, clean energy, economic development—the TVA brought together many of the elements essential to the Green New Deal. Building dams and hydroelectric power stations along the Tennessee River, it provided clean, cheap electricity to one of the most economically depressed regions of the country. The hydroelectric plants were, in turn, linked up to factories producing nitrates, an energy-intensive raw material needed for both fertilizer and explosives. Wages and crop yields rose, power costs fell. The TVA brought cheap energy, cheap fertilizer, and good jobs to a place previous known for malaria, poor soil quality, incomes less than half the national average, and alarmingly high unemployment.
The problem with this scenario as a framework for the Green New Deal is that renewables are not massively cheaper than fossil fuels. The state cannot blaze the trail to cheap, renewable energy, satisfying consumers with lower costs and producers with acceptable profits. Many once thought that the depletion of oil and coal reserves would save us, raising the price of fossil fuels above that of renewables and forcing the switch as a matter of economic necessity. Unfortunately, that messianic price point has drifted farther into the future as new drilling technologies, introduced in the last decade, have made it possible to frack oil from shale and to recover reserves from fields previously thought exhausted. The price of oil has stayed stubbornly low, and the US is, suddenly, producing more of it than anyone else. The doomsday scenarios of “peak oil” are now a turn-of-the-millennium curiosity, like Y2K or Al Gore. Sorry, wrong apocalypse.
Some will tell you that renewables can compete with fossil fuels on the open market. Wind and hydroelectric and geothermal have, it’s true, become cheaper as sources of electricity, in some cases cheaper than coal and natural gas. But they’re still not cheap enough. That’s because, in order to bankrupt the fossil capitalists, renewables will need to do more than edge out fossil fuels by a penny or two per kilowatt-hour. There are trillions of dollars sunk into fossil energy infrastructure and the owners of those investments will invariably choose to recoup some of that investment rather than none of it. To send the value of those assets to zero and force energy capitalists to invest in new factories, renewables need to be not only cheaper but massively cheaper, impossibly cheaper. At least this is the conclusion reached by a group of engineers Google convened to study the problem. Existing technologies are never going to be cheap enough to bankrupt coal-fired power plants: we’d need stuff that is currently science-fiction like cold fusion. This is not only because of the problem of sunk costs, but because electricity from solar and wind is not “dispatchable” on demand. It is only available when and where the sun is shining and the wind is blowing. If you want it on demand, you’re going to have to store it (or transport it thousands of miles) and that’s going to raise the price.
Most will tell you that the answer to this problem is taxation of dirty energy or an outright ban, alongside subsidy of the clean. A carbon tax, judiciously applied, can tip the scales in favor of renewables until they are able to beat fossil energy outright. New fossil sources and infrastructure can be prohibited and revenue from the taxes can be used to pay for research into new technology, efficiency improvements, and subsidies for consumers. But now one is talking about something other than a New Deal, blazing the way to a more highly productive capitalism in which profits and wages can rise together. There are 1.5 trillion barrels of proven oil reserves on the planet, according to some calculations—around $50 trillion worth if we assume a very low average cost per barrel of thirty-five dollars. This is value that oil companies have already accounted for in their mathematical imaginings. If carbon taxes or bans reduce that number tenfold, fossil capitalists will do everything they can to avoid, subvert, and repeal them. The problem of sunk costs again applies. If you slaughter the value of those reserves, you might, perversely, bring down the cost of fossil fuels, encouraging more consumption and more emissions, as oil producers scramble to sell their excess supply in countries without a carbon tax. For reference, there is about $300 trillion of total wealth on the planet, most of it in the hands of the owning class. The global Gross Domestic Product, the value of all the goods and services produced in a year, is around $80 trillion. If you propose to wipe out $50 trillion, one-sixth of the wealth on the planet, equal to two-thirds of global GDP, you should expect the owners of that wealth to fight you with everything they have, which is more or less everything.
[...]
If you tax oil, capital will sell it elsewhere. If you increase demand for raw materials, capital will bid up the prices of commodities, and rush materials to market in the most wasteful, energy-intensive way. If you require millions of square miles for solar panels, wind farms, and biofuel crops, capital will bid up the price of real estate. If you slap tariffs on necessary imports, capital will leave for better markets. If you try to set a maximum price that doesn’t allow profit, capital will simply stop investing. Lop off one head of the hydra, face another. Invest trillions of dollars into infrastructure in the US and you’ll have to confront the staggeringly wasteful, slow, and unproductive construction industry, where laying a mile of subway can be twenty times as expensive and take four times as long. You’ll have to confront the earthen monsters of Bechtel and Fluor Corp., habituated to feeding at the government trough and billing fifty dollar screws. If this doesn’t chasten you, consider the world-historical inefficiency of the US military, the planet’s biggest oil consumer and, unsurprisingly, also the planet’s main oil cop. The Pentagon is an accounting black hole, into which the wealth of the nation is ploughed and from which no light emerges. Its balance sheet is a blank.
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I suspect many advocates of the Green New Deal know all this. They don’t really think it will happen as promised, and they know that, if it does happen, it won’t work. This is probably why there’s so little concrete detail being offered. Discussion so far has largely revolved around the question of budgeting, with the advocates of Modern Monetary Theory arguing that there is no upper bound on government spending for a country like the US, and tax-and-spend leftists firing back with all sorts of counter-scenarios. The MMT advocates are technically correct, but they discount the power that owners of US debt have to determine the value of the dollar, and therefore prices and profits. Meanwhile, critics of the Green New Deal confine their discussion to the least problematic aspects. Don’t get me wrong, budget items on the order of tens of trillions of dollars are a big deal. But securing the bag is hardly the biggest problem. Implementation is where it really dies, and few advocates have much to say about such details.
The Green New Deal proposes to decarbonize most of the economy in ten years—great, but no one is talking about how. This is because, for many, its value is primarily rhetorical; it’s about shifting the discussion, gathering political will, and underscoring the urgency of the climate crisis. It’s more big mood more than grand plan. Many socialists will recognize that mitigation of climate change within a system of production for profit is impossible, but they think a project like the Green New Deal is what Leon Trotsky called a “transitional program,” hinged upon a “transitional demand.” Unlike the minimal demand, which capitalism can easily meet, and the maximal demand which it clearly can’t, the transitional demand is something that capitalism could potentially meet if it were a rational and humane system, but in actuality can’t. By agitating around this transitional demand, socialists expose capitalism as an extraordinarily wasteful and destructive coordinator of human activity, incapable of delivering on its own potential and, in this case, responsible for an unimaginable number of future deaths. So exposed, one might then safely proceed to do away with capitalism. Faced with the resistance of the capitalist class and an entrenched government bureaucracy, officials elected around a Green New Deal could safely, with the support of the masses, move to expropriate the capitalist class and reorganize the state along socialist lines. Or so the story goes.
I’ve always despised the transitional program concept. I think, for starters, that it’s condescending, presuming that the “masses” need to be told one thing in order, eventually, to be convinced of another. I also think it’s dangerous, with the potential to profoundly backfire. Revolutions do begin, often, where reforms fail. But the problem is that the transitional demand encourages you to build institutions and organizations around one set of goals with the hope that you can rapidly convert them to another when the time comes. But institutions are tremendously inertial structures. If you build a party and other institutions around the idea of solving climate change within capitalism, do not be surprised when some large fraction of that party resists your attempt to convert it into a revolutionary organ. The history of socialist and communist parties is reason for caution. Even after the Second International betrayed its members by sending them to slaughter each other in the First World War, and even after a huge fraction split to form revolutionary organizations in the wake of the Russian Revolution, many members of the party and its network of unions continued to support it, out of habit and because it had built a thick network of cultural and social structures to which they were bound by a million and one ties. Beware that, in pursuit of the transitional program, you do not build up the forces of your future enemy.
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Let’s instead say what we know to be true. The pathway to climate stabilization below two degrees Celsius offered by the Green New Deal is illusory. Indeed, at present the only solutions possible within the framework of capitalism are ghastly, risky forms of geo-engineering, chemically poisoning either the ocean or the sky to absorb carbon or limit sunlight, preserving capitalism and its host, humanity, at the cost of the sky (now weatherless) or the ocean (now lifeless). Unlike emissions reductions, such projects will not require international collaboration. Any country could begin geo-engineering right now. What’s to stop China or the US from deciding to dump sulfur into the sky, if things get hot enough and bad enough?
The problem with the Green New Deal is that it promises to change everything while keeping everything the same. It promises to switch out the energetic basis of modern society as if one were changing the battery in a car. You still buy a new iPhone every two years, but zero emissions. The world of the Green New Deal is this world but better—this world but with zero emissions, universal health care, and free college. The appeal is obvious but the combination impossible. We can’t remain in this world. To preserve the ecological niche in which we and our cohort of species have lived for the last eleven thousand years, we will have to completely reorganize society, changing where and how and most importantly why we live. Given current technology, there is no possibility to continue using more energy per person, more land per person, more more per person. This need not mean a gray world of grim austerity, though that’s what’s coming if inequality and dispossession continue. An emancipated society, in which no one can force another into work for reasons of property, could offer joy, meaning, freedom, satisfaction, and even a sort of abundance. We can easily have enough of what matters—conserving energy and other resources for food, shelter, and medicine. As is obvious to anyone who spends a good thirty seconds really looking, half of what surrounds us in capitalism is needless waste. Beyond our foundational needs, the most important abundance is an abundance of time, and time is, thankfully, carbon-zero, and even perhaps carbon-negative. If revolutionaries in societies that used one-fourth as much energy as we do thought communism right around the corner, then there’s no need to shackle ourselves to the gruesome imperatives of growth. A society in which everyone is free to pursue learning, play, sport, amusement, companionship, and travel, in this we see the abundance that matters.
Perhaps breakthrough decarbonizing or zero-emissions technologies are almost here. One would be a fool to discount the possibility. But waiting for lightning to strike is not a politics. It’s been almost seventy years since the last paradigm-shifting technology was invented—transistors, nuclear power, genomics, all date from the middle of the twentieth century. Illusions of perspective and the endless stream of apps notwithstanding, the pace of technological change has slowed rather than accelerated. In any case, if capitalism suddenly finds it within its means to mitigate climate change, we can shift to talking about one of the other ten reasons why we should end it.
We cannot keep things the same and change everything. We need a revolution, a break with capital and its killing compulsions, though what that looks like in the twenty-first century is very much an open question. A revolution that had as its aim the flourishing of all human life would certainly mean immediate decarbonization, a rapid decrease in energy use for those in the industrialized global north, no more cement, very little steel, almost no air travel, walkable human settlements, passive heating and cooling, a total transformation of agriculture, and a diminishment of animal pasture by an order of magnitude at least. All of this is possible, but not if we continue to shovel one half of all the wealth produced on the planet into the maw of capital, not if we continue to sacrifice some fraction of each generation by sending them into the pits, not if we continue to allow those whose only aim is profit to decide how we live.
Thursday, May 9, 2019
Landmark study by Côté S, House J, Willer R (2015) said that higher income individuals are less generous than poorer individuals if they reside in a US state with comparatively large economic inequality; not reproducible
No evidence that economic inequality moderates the effect of income on generosity. Stefan C. Schmukle, Martin Korndörfer, and Boris Egloff. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. April 29, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1807942116
Significance: Are the rich less generous than the poor? Results of studies on this topic have been inconsistent. Recent research that has received widespread academic and media attention has provided evidence that higher income individuals are less generous than poorer individuals only if they reside in a US state with comparatively large economic inequality. However, in large representative datasets from the United States (study 1), Germany (study 2), and 30 countries (study 3), we did not find any evidence for such an effect. Instead, our results suggest that the rich are not less generous than the poor, even when economic inequality is large. This result has implications for contemporary debates on what increasing inequality in resource distributions means for modern societies.
Abstract: A landmark study published in PNAS [Côté S, House J, Willer R (2015) Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 112:15838–15843] showed that higher income individuals are less generous than poorer individuals only if they reside in a US state with comparatively large economic inequality. This finding might serve to reconcile inconsistent findings on the effect of social class on generosity by highlighting the moderating role of economic inequality. On the basis of the importance of replicating a major finding before readily accepting it as evidence, we analyzed the effect of the interaction between income and inequality on generosity in three large representative datasets. We analyzed the donating behavior of 27,714 US households (study 1), the generosity of 1,334 German individuals in an economic game (study 2), and volunteering to participate in charitable activities in 30,985 participants from 30 countries (study 3). We found no evidence for the postulated moderation effect in any study. This result is especially remarkable because (i) our samples were very large, leading to high power to detect effects that exist, and (ii) the cross-country analysis employed in study 3 led to much greater variability in economic inequality. These findings indicate that the moderation effect might be rather specific and cannot be easily generalized. Consequently, economic inequality might not be a plausible explanation for the heterogeneous results on the effect of social class on prosociality.
Keywords: social classincomeeconomic inequalityprosocial behaviorgenerosity
Significance: Are the rich less generous than the poor? Results of studies on this topic have been inconsistent. Recent research that has received widespread academic and media attention has provided evidence that higher income individuals are less generous than poorer individuals only if they reside in a US state with comparatively large economic inequality. However, in large representative datasets from the United States (study 1), Germany (study 2), and 30 countries (study 3), we did not find any evidence for such an effect. Instead, our results suggest that the rich are not less generous than the poor, even when economic inequality is large. This result has implications for contemporary debates on what increasing inequality in resource distributions means for modern societies.
Abstract: A landmark study published in PNAS [Côté S, House J, Willer R (2015) Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 112:15838–15843] showed that higher income individuals are less generous than poorer individuals only if they reside in a US state with comparatively large economic inequality. This finding might serve to reconcile inconsistent findings on the effect of social class on generosity by highlighting the moderating role of economic inequality. On the basis of the importance of replicating a major finding before readily accepting it as evidence, we analyzed the effect of the interaction between income and inequality on generosity in three large representative datasets. We analyzed the donating behavior of 27,714 US households (study 1), the generosity of 1,334 German individuals in an economic game (study 2), and volunteering to participate in charitable activities in 30,985 participants from 30 countries (study 3). We found no evidence for the postulated moderation effect in any study. This result is especially remarkable because (i) our samples were very large, leading to high power to detect effects that exist, and (ii) the cross-country analysis employed in study 3 led to much greater variability in economic inequality. These findings indicate that the moderation effect might be rather specific and cannot be easily generalized. Consequently, economic inequality might not be a plausible explanation for the heterogeneous results on the effect of social class on prosociality.
Keywords: social classincomeeconomic inequalityprosocial behaviorgenerosity
Not all instances of gender inequality are equally concerning: An emphasis on women's underrepresentation in STEM has not been matched by a similar concern about men's underrepresentation in Healthcare, Early Education, etc
Do people care if men don't care about caring? The asymmetry in support for changing gender roles. Katharina Block et al. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Volume 83, July 2019, Pages 112-131. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2019.03.013
Highlights
• Gender imbalances are perceived differently for male- vs. female-dominant careers.
• Stronger support for social change when women (vs. men) are underrepresented.
• External barriers are thought to constrain gender balance in male-dominated jobs.
• Motivation is thought to constrain gender balance in female-dominated jobs.
• Asymmetrical support for change is predicted by gender distribution, not salary.
Abstract: Not all instances of gender inequality are equally concerning. An emphasis on women's underrepresentation in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math roles (STEM) has not been matched by a similar concern about men's underrepresentation in Healthcare, Early Education, and Domestic roles (HEED). The current research investigates whether and why people perceive gender imbalances in male-dominated careers (STEM and leadership) as more problematic than gender imbalances in female-dominated, caregiving careers (HEED). Results from four studies (total N = 754) document a tendency to more strongly support the inclusion of women in male-dominated careers, compared to the inclusion of men in female-dominated careers. This asymmetry in support for social action towards change is predicted by beliefs about what the ideal gender representation should be and the perceived causes of gender imbalances in each career type. Notably, gender representation in careers (and not salary) is the key factor underlying discrepant support for change (Study 4).
Highlights
• Gender imbalances are perceived differently for male- vs. female-dominant careers.
• Stronger support for social change when women (vs. men) are underrepresented.
• External barriers are thought to constrain gender balance in male-dominated jobs.
• Motivation is thought to constrain gender balance in female-dominated jobs.
• Asymmetrical support for change is predicted by gender distribution, not salary.
Abstract: Not all instances of gender inequality are equally concerning. An emphasis on women's underrepresentation in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math roles (STEM) has not been matched by a similar concern about men's underrepresentation in Healthcare, Early Education, and Domestic roles (HEED). The current research investigates whether and why people perceive gender imbalances in male-dominated careers (STEM and leadership) as more problematic than gender imbalances in female-dominated, caregiving careers (HEED). Results from four studies (total N = 754) document a tendency to more strongly support the inclusion of women in male-dominated careers, compared to the inclusion of men in female-dominated careers. This asymmetry in support for social action towards change is predicted by beliefs about what the ideal gender representation should be and the perceived causes of gender imbalances in each career type. Notably, gender representation in careers (and not salary) is the key factor underlying discrepant support for change (Study 4).
Less problems for baby in spring birth causes an average marginal willingness to pay for a spring birth to be $877; this implies a willingness to trade‐off 560 grams of birth weight to get a spring birth
The Demand for Season of Birth. Damian Clarke, Sonia Oreffice. Climent Quintana‐Domeque. Journal of Applied Econometrics, May 2 2019. https://doi.org/10.1002/jae.2711
Summary: We study the determinants of season of birth for married women aged 20‐45 in the US, using birth certificate and Census data. We also elicit the willingness to pay for season of birth through discrete choice experiments implemented on the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform. We document that the probability of a spring first birth is significantly related to mother's age, education, race, ethnicity, smoking status during pregnancy, receiving WIC food benefits during pregnancy, pre‐pregnancy obesity and the mother working in “education, training, and library” occupations, whereas among unmarried women without a father acknowledged on their child's birth certificate, all our findings are muted. A summer first birth does not depend on socioeconomic characteristics, although it is the most common birth season in the US. Among married women aged 20‐45, we estimate the average marginal willingness to pay (WTP) for a spring birth to be 877 USD. This implies a willingness to trade‐off 560 grams of birth weight to achieve a spring birth. Finally, we estimate that an increase of 1,000 USD in the predicted marginal WTP for a spring birth is associated with a 15 pp increase in the probability of obtaining an actual spring birth.
Keywords: quarter of birth, fertility timing, willingness to pay, discrete choice experiments.
1 Introduction
While the relevance of season of birth has been acknowledged at least since Huntington’s 1938 book “Season of Birth: Its Relation to Human Abilities”, it was not until recently that season of birth became prominent in biology, economics and social sciences more generally.There is now a well-established literature illustrating a variety of aspects that are significantly correlated with season of birth, including birth weight, education, earnings, height, life expectancy, schizophrenia, etc. Although understanding the channels through which season of birth affects these outcomes still represents a scientific challenge, in the US winter months are associated with lower birth weight, education, and earnings, while spring and summer are found to be “good” seasons (e.g., Buckles and Hungerman, 2013; Currie and Schwandt, 2013).
Using birth certificate and Census data we provide new evidence on season of birth patterns and correlates with demographic and socioeconomic characteristics among married women, which are absent among unmarried women with no paternity acknowledgement ontheir child’s birth certificate, or among those using assisted reproductive technology (ART)procedures. We argue that these can be explained by season of birth being a choice variablesubject to economic and biological constraints, when women do plan fertility timing. Theplausibility of a demand for season of birth is also documented by the positive averagemarginal willingness to pay for season of birth and spring in particular, which we estimateusing discrete choice experiments in the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform.Plots of first birth prevalence and influenza activity by quarter presented in Figure 1aare consistent with married women choosing a spring birth because their child will be born the farthest from the influenza peak within a year, or summer because there are fewer germsat birth and in the last stage of pregnancy. On the contrary, among unmarried motherswith no paternity acknowledgement, fall (Quarter 4) births are more prevalent, while spring(Quarter 2) births are less prevalent, in spite of facing the same influenza activity as marriedmothers. Moreover, Figure 1b shows that working in particular occupations is correlated with a higher spring birth and lower fall birth prevalence. Thus, influenza and the winterdisease environment are not sufficient to fully explain the observed birth seasonality.
Using US Vital Statistics data on all first singleton births to married women aged 20-45,we show that the prevalence of spring births is related to mother’s age in a humped-shapedfashion, positively related to education and being white, and negatively related to beingHispanic, smoking and receiving food benefits during pregnancy, conditional on gestationweek, state and year fixed effects. However, maternal socioeconomic characteristics do notcorrelate with the probability of having a baby in summer, despite summer being the mostcommon birth season in the US. When focusing on the placebo group of unmarried motherswith no paternity acknowledgement on their child’s birth certificate, our seasonal patternsare muted, consistent with the idea that the children of unmarried women with no stablepartner or long-term relationship are less likely to be planned, and thus it is less likelythat their season of birth is chosen (Almond and Rossin-Slater, 2013; Rossin-Slater, 2017). Indeed, in the US, unmarried women are reported to be more than twice as likely to haveunwanted pregnancies than married women (Finer and Zolna, 2016; Mosher et al., 2012).
We then examine the interaction of a first singleton child’s season of birth with his orher mother’s occupation using data from the American Community Survey. Our findingsreveal that in professions allowing more flexibility in taking time off work and those thathave summer breaks (e.g., among teachers), married mothers are additionally more likely tochoose spring births butnotsummer births, and this holds conditional on age, education,race, ethnicity and state and year fixed effects. This is consistent with the evidence inFigure 1b.
Inspired by Buckles and Hungerman (2013), who recognize that a thorough investigationof preferences for birth timing is an open and fertile challenge for future work, we devisedand ran a series of discrete choice experiments in the Amazon Mechanical Turk marketplace in September 2016 and May 2018, to elicit the willingness to pay for season of birth in two different quarters of the year.1We estimate the average marginal willingness to payfor a spring birth to be 620 USD. We also find that the average marginal willingness to pay (WTP) is larger (about 877 USD) among married mothers aged 20-45, our main groupof analysis in the birth certificate and Census data, whereas among respondents who donot intend to have children the average marginal WTP is much smaller (about 455 USD)and not statistically different from zero, which provides an interesting placebo. Exploringheterogeneity by number of children, we find that our estimate is driven by married mothersaged 20-45 with two or more children (1,100 USD).Using a mixed logit to allow for preference heterogeneity among married mothers aged20-45 in the M-Turk data, we estimate the marginal WTP for spring births for each marriedmother aged 20-45. We then predict the estimated marginal WTP for spring births using maternal characteristics in the same M-Turk data. Assuming transportability from M-Turk to birth certificate data, we use the estimated coefficients on the maternal characteristics to predict the marginal WTP for each married mother aged 20-45 in the latter data. We then investigate the relationship between predicted marginal WTP and spring births in the birthcertificate data. We find that a 1,000 USD increase in the predicted marginal WTP for aspring birth is associated with an increase in the actual probability of giving birth in springof about 15 pp. This finding suggests that average elicited M-Turk responses do correlatewith actual behavior.Our estimated seasonality gaps, between−0.5 pp (Hispanic vs. non-Hispanic) and 0.9pp (received food benefits during pregnancy) in the birth certificate data, and 5 pp by occupation in the Census data, are sizable. Buckles and Hungerman (2013) report a 1 pp difference in teenage mothers and a 2 pp difference in unmarried or non-white mothers between January births and May births, and they interpret these gaps as “strikingly large”compared to the estimated effects of welfare benefits on non-marital childbearing (Rosen-zweig, 1999) or unemployment on fertility (Dehejia and Lleras-Muney, 2004).
1 We thank an anonymous referee for the suggestion to run an additional survey in a different season.
Summary: We study the determinants of season of birth for married women aged 20‐45 in the US, using birth certificate and Census data. We also elicit the willingness to pay for season of birth through discrete choice experiments implemented on the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform. We document that the probability of a spring first birth is significantly related to mother's age, education, race, ethnicity, smoking status during pregnancy, receiving WIC food benefits during pregnancy, pre‐pregnancy obesity and the mother working in “education, training, and library” occupations, whereas among unmarried women without a father acknowledged on their child's birth certificate, all our findings are muted. A summer first birth does not depend on socioeconomic characteristics, although it is the most common birth season in the US. Among married women aged 20‐45, we estimate the average marginal willingness to pay (WTP) for a spring birth to be 877 USD. This implies a willingness to trade‐off 560 grams of birth weight to achieve a spring birth. Finally, we estimate that an increase of 1,000 USD in the predicted marginal WTP for a spring birth is associated with a 15 pp increase in the probability of obtaining an actual spring birth.
Keywords: quarter of birth, fertility timing, willingness to pay, discrete choice experiments.
1 Introduction
While the relevance of season of birth has been acknowledged at least since Huntington’s 1938 book “Season of Birth: Its Relation to Human Abilities”, it was not until recently that season of birth became prominent in biology, economics and social sciences more generally.There is now a well-established literature illustrating a variety of aspects that are significantly correlated with season of birth, including birth weight, education, earnings, height, life expectancy, schizophrenia, etc. Although understanding the channels through which season of birth affects these outcomes still represents a scientific challenge, in the US winter months are associated with lower birth weight, education, and earnings, while spring and summer are found to be “good” seasons (e.g., Buckles and Hungerman, 2013; Currie and Schwandt, 2013).
Using birth certificate and Census data we provide new evidence on season of birth patterns and correlates with demographic and socioeconomic characteristics among married women, which are absent among unmarried women with no paternity acknowledgement ontheir child’s birth certificate, or among those using assisted reproductive technology (ART)procedures. We argue that these can be explained by season of birth being a choice variablesubject to economic and biological constraints, when women do plan fertility timing. Theplausibility of a demand for season of birth is also documented by the positive averagemarginal willingness to pay for season of birth and spring in particular, which we estimateusing discrete choice experiments in the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform.Plots of first birth prevalence and influenza activity by quarter presented in Figure 1aare consistent with married women choosing a spring birth because their child will be born the farthest from the influenza peak within a year, or summer because there are fewer germsat birth and in the last stage of pregnancy. On the contrary, among unmarried motherswith no paternity acknowledgement, fall (Quarter 4) births are more prevalent, while spring(Quarter 2) births are less prevalent, in spite of facing the same influenza activity as marriedmothers. Moreover, Figure 1b shows that working in particular occupations is correlated with a higher spring birth and lower fall birth prevalence. Thus, influenza and the winterdisease environment are not sufficient to fully explain the observed birth seasonality.
Using US Vital Statistics data on all first singleton births to married women aged 20-45,we show that the prevalence of spring births is related to mother’s age in a humped-shapedfashion, positively related to education and being white, and negatively related to beingHispanic, smoking and receiving food benefits during pregnancy, conditional on gestationweek, state and year fixed effects. However, maternal socioeconomic characteristics do notcorrelate with the probability of having a baby in summer, despite summer being the mostcommon birth season in the US. When focusing on the placebo group of unmarried motherswith no paternity acknowledgement on their child’s birth certificate, our seasonal patternsare muted, consistent with the idea that the children of unmarried women with no stablepartner or long-term relationship are less likely to be planned, and thus it is less likelythat their season of birth is chosen (Almond and Rossin-Slater, 2013; Rossin-Slater, 2017). Indeed, in the US, unmarried women are reported to be more than twice as likely to haveunwanted pregnancies than married women (Finer and Zolna, 2016; Mosher et al., 2012).
We then examine the interaction of a first singleton child’s season of birth with his orher mother’s occupation using data from the American Community Survey. Our findingsreveal that in professions allowing more flexibility in taking time off work and those thathave summer breaks (e.g., among teachers), married mothers are additionally more likely tochoose spring births butnotsummer births, and this holds conditional on age, education,race, ethnicity and state and year fixed effects. This is consistent with the evidence inFigure 1b.
Inspired by Buckles and Hungerman (2013), who recognize that a thorough investigationof preferences for birth timing is an open and fertile challenge for future work, we devisedand ran a series of discrete choice experiments in the Amazon Mechanical Turk marketplace in September 2016 and May 2018, to elicit the willingness to pay for season of birth in two different quarters of the year.1We estimate the average marginal willingness to payfor a spring birth to be 620 USD. We also find that the average marginal willingness to pay (WTP) is larger (about 877 USD) among married mothers aged 20-45, our main groupof analysis in the birth certificate and Census data, whereas among respondents who donot intend to have children the average marginal WTP is much smaller (about 455 USD)and not statistically different from zero, which provides an interesting placebo. Exploringheterogeneity by number of children, we find that our estimate is driven by married mothersaged 20-45 with two or more children (1,100 USD).Using a mixed logit to allow for preference heterogeneity among married mothers aged20-45 in the M-Turk data, we estimate the marginal WTP for spring births for each marriedmother aged 20-45. We then predict the estimated marginal WTP for spring births using maternal characteristics in the same M-Turk data. Assuming transportability from M-Turk to birth certificate data, we use the estimated coefficients on the maternal characteristics to predict the marginal WTP for each married mother aged 20-45 in the latter data. We then investigate the relationship between predicted marginal WTP and spring births in the birthcertificate data. We find that a 1,000 USD increase in the predicted marginal WTP for aspring birth is associated with an increase in the actual probability of giving birth in springof about 15 pp. This finding suggests that average elicited M-Turk responses do correlatewith actual behavior.Our estimated seasonality gaps, between−0.5 pp (Hispanic vs. non-Hispanic) and 0.9pp (received food benefits during pregnancy) in the birth certificate data, and 5 pp by occupation in the Census data, are sizable. Buckles and Hungerman (2013) report a 1 pp difference in teenage mothers and a 2 pp difference in unmarried or non-white mothers between January births and May births, and they interpret these gaps as “strikingly large”compared to the estimated effects of welfare benefits on non-marital childbearing (Rosen-zweig, 1999) or unemployment on fertility (Dehejia and Lleras-Muney, 2004).
1 We thank an anonymous referee for the suggestion to run an additional survey in a different season.
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