Less agreeable, better preserved? A PET amyloid and MRI study in a community-based cohort. Panteleimon Giannakopoulos et al. Neurobiology of Aging, February 19 2020. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neurobiolaging.2020.02.004
Highlights
• Lower Agreeableness is associated with better preservation of limbic areas
• Aging-related hippocampal volume decrease is lower in elders with higher openness
• Personality impact on brain volume is independent of amyloid load and APOE genotype
Abstract: The relationship between personality profiles and brain integrity in old age is still matter of debate. We examined the association between Big Five factor and facet scores and MRI brain volume changes upon a 54-month follow-up in 65 elderly controls with three neurocognitive assessments (baseline, 18 and 54 months), structural brain MRI (baseline and 54 months), brain amyloid PET during follow-up, and APOE genotyping. Personality was assessed with the Neuroticism Extraversion Openness Personality Inventory-Revised. Regression models were used to identify predictors of volume loss including time, age, sex, personality, amyloid load, presence of APOE epsilon 4 allele and cognitive evolution. Lower agreeableness factor scores (and four of its facets) were associated with lower volume loss in hippocampus, entorhinal cortex, amygdala, mesial temporal lobe and precuneus bilaterally. Higher openness factor scores (and two of its facets) were also associated with lower volume loss in left hippocampus. Our findings persisted when adjusting for confounders in multivariable models. These data suggest that the combination of low agreeableness and high openness is an independent predictor of better preservation of brain volume in areas vulnerable to neurodegeneration.
Monday, February 24, 2020
White-faced capuchin monkey dyads in Costa Rica practice idiosyncratic interaction sequences that involve an unusual intensity of focus on the partner, behaviours of no immediate utilitarian purpose that sometimes involve "sacred objects"
Capuchin monkey rituals: an interdisciplinary study of form and function. Susan Perry, Marco Smolla. bioRxiv, Feb 24 2020. https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.02.21.958223
Abstract: Many white-faced capuchin monkey dyads in Lomas Barbudal, Costa Rica, practice idiosyncratic interaction sequences that are not part of the species-typical behavioural repertoire. These interactions often include uncomfortable or risky elements. These interactions exhibit the following characteristics commonly featured in definitions of rituals in humans: (1) they involve an unusual intensity of focus on the partner, (2) the behaviours have no immediate utilitarian purpose, (3) they sometimes involve "sacred objects", (4) the distribution of these behaviours suggests that they are invented and spread via social learning, and (5) many behaviours in these rituals are repurposed from other behavioural domains (e.g. extractive foraging). However, in contrast to some definitions of ritual, capuchin rituals are not overly rigid in their form, nor do the sequences have specific opening and closing actions. In our 9,260 hours of observation, ritual performance rate was uncorrelated with amount of time dyads spent in proximity but is (modestly) associated with higher relationship quality and rate of coalition formation across dyads. Our results suggest that capuchin rituals serve a bond-testing rather than a bond-strengthening function. Ritual interactions are exclusively dyadic, and between-dyad consistency in form is low, casting doubt on the alternative hypothesis that they enhance group-wide solidarity.
Abstract: Many white-faced capuchin monkey dyads in Lomas Barbudal, Costa Rica, practice idiosyncratic interaction sequences that are not part of the species-typical behavioural repertoire. These interactions often include uncomfortable or risky elements. These interactions exhibit the following characteristics commonly featured in definitions of rituals in humans: (1) they involve an unusual intensity of focus on the partner, (2) the behaviours have no immediate utilitarian purpose, (3) they sometimes involve "sacred objects", (4) the distribution of these behaviours suggests that they are invented and spread via social learning, and (5) many behaviours in these rituals are repurposed from other behavioural domains (e.g. extractive foraging). However, in contrast to some definitions of ritual, capuchin rituals are not overly rigid in their form, nor do the sequences have specific opening and closing actions. In our 9,260 hours of observation, ritual performance rate was uncorrelated with amount of time dyads spent in proximity but is (modestly) associated with higher relationship quality and rate of coalition formation across dyads. Our results suggest that capuchin rituals serve a bond-testing rather than a bond-strengthening function. Ritual interactions are exclusively dyadic, and between-dyad consistency in form is low, casting doubt on the alternative hypothesis that they enhance group-wide solidarity.
Democrats overestimate the explicit prejudice of the American electorate, & thus see disadvantaged groups as less electable; Democrats who frequently interacted with Republicans had more accurate estimations of explicit prejudice
Mercier, Brett, Jared Celniker, and Azim Shariff. 2020. “Overestimating Explicit Prejudice Causes Democrats to Believe Disadvantaged Groups Are Less Electable.” PsyArXiv. February 24. doi:10.31234/osf.io/s52qz
Abstract: Three studies show that Democrats overestimate the explicit prejudice of the American electorate, and thus see disadvantaged groups as less electable. Study 1 found that Democrats underestimated the percentage of Americans who say they would vote for presidential candidates from disadvantaged groups. Study 2 replicated this finding and demonstrated that Democrats who perceive high levels of explicit prejudice towards a group also believe presidential candidates from that group would be less electable. Moreover, Democrats who frequently interacted with Republicans had more accurate estimations of explicit prejudice. Study 3 found that correcting misperceptions about explicit prejudice made Democrats believe generic presidential candidates from disadvantaged groups would be more electable. We did not find evidence that correcting misperceptions affected beliefs about the electability of specific candidates in the 2020 Democratic Primary or support for these candidates.
Abstract: Three studies show that Democrats overestimate the explicit prejudice of the American electorate, and thus see disadvantaged groups as less electable. Study 1 found that Democrats underestimated the percentage of Americans who say they would vote for presidential candidates from disadvantaged groups. Study 2 replicated this finding and demonstrated that Democrats who perceive high levels of explicit prejudice towards a group also believe presidential candidates from that group would be less electable. Moreover, Democrats who frequently interacted with Republicans had more accurate estimations of explicit prejudice. Study 3 found that correcting misperceptions about explicit prejudice made Democrats believe generic presidential candidates from disadvantaged groups would be more electable. We did not find evidence that correcting misperceptions affected beliefs about the electability of specific candidates in the 2020 Democratic Primary or support for these candidates.
Ability self-estimates (SEs) exhibit strong correlations with personality traits; in most domains, personality explains more variance in SEs than abilities do
Self-estimates of abilities are a better reflection of individuals’ personality traits than of their abilities and are also strong predictors of professional interests. Aljoscha C. Neubauer, Gabriela Hofer. Personality and Individual Differences, February 24 2020, 109850. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2020.109850
Highlights
• Ability self-estimates (SEs) exhibit strong correlations with personality traits.
• Personality predicts SEs independently of measured abilities and grades.
• In most domains, personality explains more variance in SEs than abilities do.
• Interests are mostly a function of self-estimated and not true abilities.
Abstract: In several meta-analyses, self-estimates of abilities have been shown to correlate surprisingly low with individuals’ real (i.e., psychometrically assessed) abilities. We recently confirmed this in a study where we investigated the accuracy of self- and peer-estimates of six central abilities (verbal, numerical, spatial intelligence, interpersonal and intrapersonal competence, creative/divergent thinking). Here, we describe two studies: In study 1, we first investigated, to which extent self-estimates of adolescents’ central abilities can be predicted from three sources: relevant school grades, the pertinent psychometric ability itself, and personality (big five traits and narcissism). We found that self-estimates are a stronger reflection of the individuals’ personality than their abilities per se. Second, we wanted to assess to what degree (professional) interests, which might guide career decisions in adolescents/young adults, are predicted by self-estimated and psychometrically assessed abilities. We found that professional interests are mostly a function of self-estimates and not of ‘true’ abilities, a finding that we replicated in study 2 with young adults. Given the strong associations between self-estimates and personality and past findings showing that abilities are better predictors of professional success than personality traits are, this might be non-optimal.
Keywords: IntelligenceEmotional intelligenceCreativitySelf-estimatesGradesInterestsAdolescents
Highlights
• Ability self-estimates (SEs) exhibit strong correlations with personality traits.
• Personality predicts SEs independently of measured abilities and grades.
• In most domains, personality explains more variance in SEs than abilities do.
• Interests are mostly a function of self-estimated and not true abilities.
Abstract: In several meta-analyses, self-estimates of abilities have been shown to correlate surprisingly low with individuals’ real (i.e., psychometrically assessed) abilities. We recently confirmed this in a study where we investigated the accuracy of self- and peer-estimates of six central abilities (verbal, numerical, spatial intelligence, interpersonal and intrapersonal competence, creative/divergent thinking). Here, we describe two studies: In study 1, we first investigated, to which extent self-estimates of adolescents’ central abilities can be predicted from three sources: relevant school grades, the pertinent psychometric ability itself, and personality (big five traits and narcissism). We found that self-estimates are a stronger reflection of the individuals’ personality than their abilities per se. Second, we wanted to assess to what degree (professional) interests, which might guide career decisions in adolescents/young adults, are predicted by self-estimated and psychometrically assessed abilities. We found that professional interests are mostly a function of self-estimates and not of ‘true’ abilities, a finding that we replicated in study 2 with young adults. Given the strong associations between self-estimates and personality and past findings showing that abilities are better predictors of professional success than personality traits are, this might be non-optimal.
Keywords: IntelligenceEmotional intelligenceCreativitySelf-estimatesGradesInterestsAdolescents
Individuals rated their past relationship quality more negatively in retrospect than they saw when in the relation; this bias ma ybe a motivated cognition that helps individuals let go of their ex-partners after a breakup
Ex-appraisal bias: Negative illusions in appraising relationship quality retrospectively. Aidan P. J. Smyth, Johanna Peetz, Adrienne A. Capaldi. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, February 24, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1177/0265407520907150
Abstract: Cognitive biases are prevalent within the context of romantic relationships. The present research investigated biases about relationships after they have ended. In a longitudinal design (N = 184), individuals reported relationship quality at two time points, as well as rated relationship quality retrospectively. Results supported an ex-appraisal bias: individuals rated their past relationship quality more negatively in retrospect than they had actually reported at the time. This bias was present across participants who stayed together and those who broke up but was three times larger for those whose relationships had ended. This bias may be a motivated cognition that helps individuals let go of their ex-partners after a breakup.
Keywords: Breakup, ex-appraisal bias, ex-partner, motivated cognition, retrospective bias, romantic relationships
Abstract: Cognitive biases are prevalent within the context of romantic relationships. The present research investigated biases about relationships after they have ended. In a longitudinal design (N = 184), individuals reported relationship quality at two time points, as well as rated relationship quality retrospectively. Results supported an ex-appraisal bias: individuals rated their past relationship quality more negatively in retrospect than they had actually reported at the time. This bias was present across participants who stayed together and those who broke up but was three times larger for those whose relationships had ended. This bias may be a motivated cognition that helps individuals let go of their ex-partners after a breakup.
Keywords: Breakup, ex-appraisal bias, ex-partner, motivated cognition, retrospective bias, romantic relationships
Personality, behavioral strengths and difficulties and performance of adolescents with high achievements in science, literature, art and sports
Personality, behavioral strengths and difficulties and performance of adolescents with high achievements in science, literature, art and sports. Kostas A. Papageorgiou et al. Personality and Individual Differences, Volume 160, 1 July 2020, 109917. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2020.109917
Highlights
• Personality was more strongly related to behaviour problems than to achievement.
• Personality may be indirectly linked with achievement via behavior problems.
• Teacher-awarded grades, but not exam grades, were weakly connected with personality.
• Teachers gave higher grades to students with ‘desirable’ personality traits.
• Unlike dark traits, narcissism correlated negatively with internalizing problems.
Abstract: Individual variation in personality is related to differences in behavioral difficulties and achievement in unselected samples, and in samples selected for high achievement in various domains. This is the first study to explore and compare the connections between self-report measures of personality (Big Five and Dark Triad), behavioral strengths and difficulties, and school achievement in four tracks of high-achieving adolescents (N = 1179) selected based on their exceptional performance in: Science, Arts, Sports and Literature. Personality was more strongly related to behavioral strengths and difficulties than to achievement in all tracks. As such, personality traits may be indirectly linked with achievement via behavioral strengths and difficulties. For example, narcissism correlated negatively with behavioral difficulties but did not significantly correlate with achievement. However, achievement was correlated negatively with behavioral difficulties. Network analyses indicated that teacher-awarded grades, but not anonymous exam grades, were weakly connected with personality. Specifically, teachers awarded higher grades to students with more ‘desirable’ personality traits such as high agreeableness. Results also showed track differences in the networks of personality, behavior and achievement. These findings are discussed in the context of personality as a resilience factor against behavioural difficulties and as a contributor to school achievement in gifted adolescents.
Highlights
• Personality was more strongly related to behaviour problems than to achievement.
• Personality may be indirectly linked with achievement via behavior problems.
• Teacher-awarded grades, but not exam grades, were weakly connected with personality.
• Teachers gave higher grades to students with ‘desirable’ personality traits.
• Unlike dark traits, narcissism correlated negatively with internalizing problems.
Abstract: Individual variation in personality is related to differences in behavioral difficulties and achievement in unselected samples, and in samples selected for high achievement in various domains. This is the first study to explore and compare the connections between self-report measures of personality (Big Five and Dark Triad), behavioral strengths and difficulties, and school achievement in four tracks of high-achieving adolescents (N = 1179) selected based on their exceptional performance in: Science, Arts, Sports and Literature. Personality was more strongly related to behavioral strengths and difficulties than to achievement in all tracks. As such, personality traits may be indirectly linked with achievement via behavioral strengths and difficulties. For example, narcissism correlated negatively with behavioral difficulties but did not significantly correlate with achievement. However, achievement was correlated negatively with behavioral difficulties. Network analyses indicated that teacher-awarded grades, but not anonymous exam grades, were weakly connected with personality. Specifically, teachers awarded higher grades to students with more ‘desirable’ personality traits such as high agreeableness. Results also showed track differences in the networks of personality, behavior and achievement. These findings are discussed in the context of personality as a resilience factor against behavioural difficulties and as a contributor to school achievement in gifted adolescents.
Adults spontaneously make moral judgments consistent with the logic of universalization, and children show a comparable pattern of judgment as early as 4 years old
Levine, Sydney, Max Kleiman-Weiner, Laura Schulz, josh tenenbaum, and Fiery A. Cushman. 2020. “Universalization Reasoning Guides Moral Judgment.” PsyArXiv. February 23. osf.io/p7e6h
Abstract: To explain why an action is wrong, we sometimes say: “What if everybody did that?” In other words, even if a single person’s behavior is harmless, that behavior may be wrong if it would be harmful once universalized. We formalize the process of universalization in a computational model, test its quantitative predictions in studies of human moral judgment, and distinguish it from alternative models. We show that adults spontaneously make moral judgments consistent with the logic of universalization, and that children show a comparable pattern of judgment as early as 4 years old. We conclude that alongside other well-characterized mechanisms of moral judgment, such as outcome-based and rule-based thinking, the logic of universalizing holds an important place in our moral minds.
Abstract: To explain why an action is wrong, we sometimes say: “What if everybody did that?” In other words, even if a single person’s behavior is harmless, that behavior may be wrong if it would be harmful once universalized. We formalize the process of universalization in a computational model, test its quantitative predictions in studies of human moral judgment, and distinguish it from alternative models. We show that adults spontaneously make moral judgments consistent with the logic of universalization, and that children show a comparable pattern of judgment as early as 4 years old. We conclude that alongside other well-characterized mechanisms of moral judgment, such as outcome-based and rule-based thinking, the logic of universalizing holds an important place in our moral minds.
Sunday, February 23, 2020
In Spain, the percentage of old drivers (65 an over) has raised from 10.2% in 2007 to 14.3% in 2016; cost of crashes involving 75+ y.o. drivers is 4.3 times higher than accidents involving 65–75 y.o. drivers
Does longevity impact the severity of traffic crashes? A comparative study of young-older and old-older drivers. Mercedes Ayuso, Rodrigo Sánchez, Miguel Santolino. Journal of Safety Research, February 22 2020. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jsr.2020.02.002
Highlights
• In Spain, the percentage of old drivers (65 an over) has raised from 10.2% in 2007 to 14.3% in 2016.
• Changes in crash severity patterns in the driver’s age of (approximately) 75 years old are statistically significant.
• Male drivers under 75 are more likely to be involved in serious and fatal accidents.
• Gender differences in crash severity among old-older drivers (over 75) are not observed.
• The estimated cost of crashes involving old-older drivers is 4.3 times higher than accidents involving young-older drivers (65–75).
• The expected crash cost can be more than five times higher for old-older drivers than drivers under 65.
Abstract:
Introduction: This article analyzes the effect of driver’s age in crash severity with a particular focus on those over the age of 65. The greater frequency and longevity of older drivers around the world suggests the need to introduce a possible segmentation within this group at risk, thus eliminating the generic interval of 65 and over as applied today in road safety data and in the automobile insurance sector.
Method: We investigate differences in the severity of traffic crashes among two subgroups of older drivers –young-older (65–75) and old-older (75+), and findings are compared with the age interval of drivers under 65. Here, we draw on data for 2016 provided by Spanish Traffic Authority. Parametric and semi-parametric regression models are applied.
Results: We identified the factors related to the crash, vehicle, and driver that have a significant impact on the probability of the crash being slight, serious, or fatal for the different age groups.
Conclusions: We found that crash severity and the expected costs of crashes significantly increase when the driver is over the age of 75.
Practical Applications: Our results have obvious implications for regulators responsible for road safety policies – most specifically as they consider there should be specific driver licensing requirements and driving training for elderly – and for the automobile insurance industry, which to date has not examined the impact that the longevity of drivers is likely to have on their balance sheets.
Keywords: Older driversGroups at riskBodily injuries damagesPolicy implicationsAutomobile insurance
Highlights
• In Spain, the percentage of old drivers (65 an over) has raised from 10.2% in 2007 to 14.3% in 2016.
• Changes in crash severity patterns in the driver’s age of (approximately) 75 years old are statistically significant.
• Male drivers under 75 are more likely to be involved in serious and fatal accidents.
• Gender differences in crash severity among old-older drivers (over 75) are not observed.
• The estimated cost of crashes involving old-older drivers is 4.3 times higher than accidents involving young-older drivers (65–75).
• The expected crash cost can be more than five times higher for old-older drivers than drivers under 65.
Abstract:
Introduction: This article analyzes the effect of driver’s age in crash severity with a particular focus on those over the age of 65. The greater frequency and longevity of older drivers around the world suggests the need to introduce a possible segmentation within this group at risk, thus eliminating the generic interval of 65 and over as applied today in road safety data and in the automobile insurance sector.
Method: We investigate differences in the severity of traffic crashes among two subgroups of older drivers –young-older (65–75) and old-older (75+), and findings are compared with the age interval of drivers under 65. Here, we draw on data for 2016 provided by Spanish Traffic Authority. Parametric and semi-parametric regression models are applied.
Results: We identified the factors related to the crash, vehicle, and driver that have a significant impact on the probability of the crash being slight, serious, or fatal for the different age groups.
Conclusions: We found that crash severity and the expected costs of crashes significantly increase when the driver is over the age of 75.
Practical Applications: Our results have obvious implications for regulators responsible for road safety policies – most specifically as they consider there should be specific driver licensing requirements and driving training for elderly – and for the automobile insurance industry, which to date has not examined the impact that the longevity of drivers is likely to have on their balance sheets.
Keywords: Older driversGroups at riskBodily injuries damagesPolicy implicationsAutomobile insurance
Despite several methods requiring significantly more time facing mortal fear, differences in ability to enact a suicide attempt with a particular method was not associated with fearlessness about death
Fearlessness about death does not differ by suicide attempt method. Brian W. Bauer et al. Journal of Psychiatric Research, February 22 2020. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpsychires.2020.02.014
Abstract: Modern theories of suicide, such as the Interpersonal Theory of Suicide, have overcome past conceptual limitations within suicide research by examining factors that help differentiate suicide attempters from those who experience suicidal ideation, but never attempt suicide. One such factor that has been studied extensively is fearlessness about death. Given the varying levels of lethality for different methods used in suicide attempts, an important question is if different levels of fearlessness about death are needed for specific methods. The central aim of this study was to test whether various methods for suicide are associated with different levels of fearlessness about death in a large sample of suicide attempt survivors. Participants were 620 suicide attempt survivors from active military, veteran, and civilian populations. Suicide attempt status was confirmed by two independent raters coding qualitative accounts and participants indicating at least one past attempt with intent to die on other survey items. Results indicated that fearlessness about death does not differ by attempt method and that nearly all methods are statistically equivalent to one another. Despite several methods requiring significantly more time facing mortal fear and severe physical anguish (e.g., cutting, hanging/asphyxiation), as well as certain means being much more lethal (e.g., firearm), differences in ability to enact a suicide attempt with a particular method was not associated with fearlessness about death. This may further indicate the importance of clinicians focusing on practical capability aspects (e.g., means safety, access, comfort with method) with patients at an increased risk for suicide.
Keywords: Capability for suicideSuicide attemptFearlessness about deathEquivalence testing
Abstract: Modern theories of suicide, such as the Interpersonal Theory of Suicide, have overcome past conceptual limitations within suicide research by examining factors that help differentiate suicide attempters from those who experience suicidal ideation, but never attempt suicide. One such factor that has been studied extensively is fearlessness about death. Given the varying levels of lethality for different methods used in suicide attempts, an important question is if different levels of fearlessness about death are needed for specific methods. The central aim of this study was to test whether various methods for suicide are associated with different levels of fearlessness about death in a large sample of suicide attempt survivors. Participants were 620 suicide attempt survivors from active military, veteran, and civilian populations. Suicide attempt status was confirmed by two independent raters coding qualitative accounts and participants indicating at least one past attempt with intent to die on other survey items. Results indicated that fearlessness about death does not differ by attempt method and that nearly all methods are statistically equivalent to one another. Despite several methods requiring significantly more time facing mortal fear and severe physical anguish (e.g., cutting, hanging/asphyxiation), as well as certain means being much more lethal (e.g., firearm), differences in ability to enact a suicide attempt with a particular method was not associated with fearlessness about death. This may further indicate the importance of clinicians focusing on practical capability aspects (e.g., means safety, access, comfort with method) with patients at an increased risk for suicide.
Keywords: Capability for suicideSuicide attemptFearlessness about deathEquivalence testing
Pedohebephilia could be considered a form of sexual orientation for age, which includes both sexual and romantic attraction
Sexual Attraction and Falling in Love in Persons with Pedohebephilia. Frederica M. Martijn, Kelly M. Babchishin, Lesleigh E. Pullman & Michael C. Seto. Archives of Sexual Behavior, February 21 2020. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-019-01579-9
Abstract: Few studies of pedophilia or hebephilia have included questions about romantic attraction. We conducted an anonymous online survey of 306 men who self-reported as sexually attracted to children. The majority (72%) of participants reported they had fallen in love with a child in their lifetime. Participants reported greater feelings of attachment to children than feelings of infatuation. Though sexual attraction and falling in love were strongly correlated, they were not synonymous. Participants who reported pedohebephilia (defined in this study as attraction to prepubescent and pubescent children) were more likely to have fallen in love with a child than participants who reported pedohebe-ephebophilia (defined as attraction to prepubescent, pubescent, and post-pubescent minors). Also, participants with an exclusive attraction to children were more likely to have fallen in love with a child than participants who were equally attracted to children and adults. The results of this study were consistent with the suggestion of Seto (2012) that pedohebephilia could be considered a form of sexual orientation for age, which includes both sexual and romantic attraction.
Abstract: Few studies of pedophilia or hebephilia have included questions about romantic attraction. We conducted an anonymous online survey of 306 men who self-reported as sexually attracted to children. The majority (72%) of participants reported they had fallen in love with a child in their lifetime. Participants reported greater feelings of attachment to children than feelings of infatuation. Though sexual attraction and falling in love were strongly correlated, they were not synonymous. Participants who reported pedohebephilia (defined in this study as attraction to prepubescent and pubescent children) were more likely to have fallen in love with a child than participants who reported pedohebe-ephebophilia (defined as attraction to prepubescent, pubescent, and post-pubescent minors). Also, participants with an exclusive attraction to children were more likely to have fallen in love with a child than participants who were equally attracted to children and adults. The results of this study were consistent with the suggestion of Seto (2012) that pedohebephilia could be considered a form of sexual orientation for age, which includes both sexual and romantic attraction.
Laboratory: Women avoid competing with men; men seem to anticipate the lower competitiveness of female opponents, as evidenced by their greater tendency to compete against women
Gender and Willingness to Compete for High Stakes. Dennie van Dolder, Martijn J. van den Assem and Thomas Buser. Tinbergen Institute Discussion Paper TI 2020-011/I, Feb 2020. https://papers.tinbergen.nl/20011.pdf
Abstract: We examine gender differences in competitiveness, using a TV game show where the winner of an elimination competition plays a game of chance worth hundreds of thousands of euros. At several stages of the competition, contestants face a choice between continuing to compete and opting out in exchange for a comparatively modest prize. When strategic considerations are absent, we observe the well-known pattern that women are less likely to compete than men, but this difference derives entirely from women avoiding competition against men. When the decision to compete is strategic and contestants should factor in the competitiveness of others, women again avoid competing against men. Men, in turn, seem to anticipate the lower competitiveness of female opponents, as evidenced by their greater tendency to compete against women. Ability differences are unlikely to explain these results. The findings underline the importance of the gender of competitors for the analysis of differences in willingness to compete, and shed new light on the persistent gender gap at the male-dominated higher rungs of the career ladder.
JEL: D91, J16
Keywords: gender differences, competitiveness, willingness to compete, game show
Abstract: We examine gender differences in competitiveness, using a TV game show where the winner of an elimination competition plays a game of chance worth hundreds of thousands of euros. At several stages of the competition, contestants face a choice between continuing to compete and opting out in exchange for a comparatively modest prize. When strategic considerations are absent, we observe the well-known pattern that women are less likely to compete than men, but this difference derives entirely from women avoiding competition against men. When the decision to compete is strategic and contestants should factor in the competitiveness of others, women again avoid competing against men. Men, in turn, seem to anticipate the lower competitiveness of female opponents, as evidenced by their greater tendency to compete against women. Ability differences are unlikely to explain these results. The findings underline the importance of the gender of competitors for the analysis of differences in willingness to compete, and shed new light on the persistent gender gap at the male-dominated higher rungs of the career ladder.
JEL: D91, J16
Keywords: gender differences, competitiveness, willingness to compete, game show
6. Conclusion and discussion
The present paper examined gender differences in willingness to compete for high stakes, using a TV
game show where the winner of an elimination competition plays a game of chance worth hundreds
of thousands of euros. The amounts that are at stake in this real-life setting are much closer to the
sums involved in promotion competitions at the top of the labor market than the financial rewards
that are commonly employed in laboratory experiments.
We focused on two different games. In the first, contestants choose between competing in the next
elimination game and opting out for a prize. This decision resembles the tournament-entry decision
that subjects typically make in lab experiments. In line with the picture that emerges from the
experimental literature, we find that women are twice as likely as men to avoid the competition. The
comparatively high opt-out rate of women, however, derives entirely from situations where they will
face predominantly male opponents. This suggests that women have a particular dislike of competing
against men, rather than a more general dislike of competition. In this non-strategic game, men do not
appear to condition their behavior on the gender of their opponents.
In the second game one question determines the last elimination, unless one of the two remaining
contestants voluntarily accepts an opt-out prize. This head-to-head game is relatively complex,
because the optimal choice depends on the anticipated behavior of the opponent. The results show
that both genders avoid competing against a male opponent in this strategic setting. The same pattern
arises in the strategic game analyzed in the Appendix. This pattern confirms the result for the first
game that women avoid competing against men, and suggests that in strategic interactions men
anticipate a lower willingness to compete among their female opponents. In line with the results for
the first game, there is no evidence of a main effect of gender on competitiveness.
Altogether, the results confirm that gender differences in willingness to compete also occur in
situations where the stakes are very high, but they also indicate that the stereotypical image and
widely-held belief that women are less competitive than men is too simplistic. The findings show the
importance of the gender of competitors and of the presence of strategic interaction: women appear
to dislike competing against men, and men appear to exploit this when there is strategic interaction.
Hitherto, the literature on gender differences in willingness to compete has largely ignored these two
factors. Exceptions are Booth and Nolen (2012) and Geraldes (2018), who similarly find that women
avoid competing against men. Such a dislike is in line with evidence that women perform worse when
they compete against men (Gneezy, Niederle and Rustichini, 2003; Günther et al., 2010; Backus et al.,
2016; de Sousa and Hollard, 2016; Booth, Cardona-Sosa and Nolen, 2018; Booth and Yamamura, 2018).
Strategic interaction is typically ruled out by design in willingness-to-compete experiments.
Research somewhat removed from the willingness-to-compete literature indirectly supports our
conclusion about the importance of opponent gender in strategic interactions. Babcock et al. (2017)
show that women are more likely than men to volunteer for an undesirable task when interacting in
mixed-gender groups, but not when interacting in single-gender groups. Booth and Yamamura (2018)
study Japanese speedboat races and find that men adopt a more aggressive racing style in mixedgender races than in single-gender races, whereas women act less aggressively in mixed-gender races
than in single-gender races. Hernandez-Arenaz and Iriberri (2018) investigate bargaining behavior in a
Spanish TV game show and find that women ask less from men than from women.
Our setting differs in a number of ways from that of a traditional laboratory experiment. In addition to
the markedly higher stakes, the subject pool that we observe is much more diverse, and because of
the presence of a large audience and cameras, our contestants’ decisions are observed by many and
subject to considerable public scrutiny. A benefit of the diverse pool of contestants is that we can also
explore how competitiveness varies with age. We consistently find a u-shaped relation, with people
who are in their forties displaying the lowest opt-out propensity. Mayr et al. (2012) find a similar
relation between age and competitiveness among subjects in an incentivized experiment. Flory et al.
(2018) and Buser, Niederle and Oosterbeek (2020), however, report different age patterns.
A benefit of the public nature of the competition, is that this feature is shared by many consequential
real world competitions. In the political arena and upper echelons of the corporate world, for example,
people face considerable public scrutiny when they compete for top positions. This is another
argument for why our naturally occurring setting is much more similar to such real-world situations
than anonymous, low-stakes laboratory experiments. Because opting out of the competition ends
public observability and choosing to compete extends it, a difference in the attitudes of men and
women towards public observability would obfuscate the relation between gender and
competitiveness. To the best of our knowledge, the only paper that studies the impact of public
observability on competitiveness is Buser, Ranehill and van Veldhuizen (2019). They find suggestive
evidence that public observability increases men’s willingness to compete, but conclude that public
observability does not alter the magnitude of the gender gap in willingness to compete in an
economically or statistically significant way. This possible confound also occurs in many real-life
settings, but cannot explain why women display a dislike of competing against men and why men are
more competitive when they face women in a strategic setting.
Similar to the tasks that are typically used in willingness-to-compete experiments, the questions that
are central in the elimination competition are often numerical or arithmetic in nature. This similarity
facilitates the comparison of our results with those of previous studies. Research on competitiveness
often intentionally uses such tasks because mathematics is a stereotypically male area, which brings
the research closer to competitive situations in male-dominated workplaces or male-connotated areas
such as management (Niederle and Vesterlund, 2011). Although we cannot entirely rule out that our
results are partly driven by a gender difference in the ability to answer the questions, none of the
additional analyses of our data provide evidence that the quiz questions actually favor men. Second,
based on research into math performance and research into recall of factual information, there is little
reason to believe that such a difference holds true for the general population (Herlitz et al., 1997;
Nilsson, 2003; Hyde et al., 2008; Lindberg et al., 2010). Last, even if any gender difference would exist
among the initial pool of contestants, it would be relatively small among those we study because
weaker contestants are less likely to reach the stages of interest.
Of course, contestants may have held non-rational expectations about their own ability and that of
others, possibly inspired by stereotypical beliefs about the performance of men and women on math
questions. Indeed, in experimental work that uses a neutral or stereotypically female type of task,
competitiveness differences between men and women are sometimes, but not always, weak or absent
(Große and Riener, 2010; Shurchkov, 2012; Dreber, von Essen and Ranehill, 2014; Wozniak, Harbaugh
and Mayr, 2014). Stereotype-biased beliefs about performance may explain why women display a
relatively low propensity to compete against men in all the games that we study, and why men display
a relatively high propensity to compete against women when the game is strategic. This explanation,
however, is not supported by the behavior of men in the first game: there is no evidence that men are
especially eager to compete against women. If anything, men are more likely to opt out against women
than against men in this game.
A possible concern about our findings is that their generalizability might be negatively affected by
selection effects. Selection procedures are inevitable in any lab experiment or field setting, and could
potentially bias comparisons of the behavior of men and women (Larkin and Pines, 2003; Reback and
Stowe, 2011; Hogarth, Karelaia and Trujillo, 2012). Unlike contestants in most other game shows,
however, contestants in our elimination competition do not need to self-select into auditions and are
not screened and then selected by producers prior to their participation. All have won their ticket
through the popular Dutch Postcode Lottery. Even for competition-averse individuals, using this ticket
is attractive: in addition to the lucrative possibility of becoming the finalist, contestants can win many
other large prizes. Nevertheless, subjects in our study are not selected perfectly at random: all are
lottery players who were able to attend the recording, and couples might send the best or most
competitive of the two of them. Still, as a group the subjects in our study do resemble a cross-section
of the general population much more closely than subjects in most lab experiments and other field
studies do. More importantly, it is not clear how selection mechanisms could explain that the
competitiveness of men and women depends on the gender of their opponent.
Our study finds that women avoid competition against men, but remains silent on the underlying
causes of this behavior. According to the literature, differences in reluctance to compete can be driven
by differences in risk attitudes, (over)confidence, and intrinsic attitudes towards competition.
However, even in controlled experiments, and even without strategic interaction and consideration of
the role of the gender of opponents, careful disentangling of the possible determinants of
competitiveness has proven to be methodologically challenging (van Veldhuizen, 2018; Gillen,
Snowberg and Yariv, 2019). Our field data is not rich enough for delving into the possible explanations,
but it seems implausible that risk preferences depend on the gender of the opponents. This leaves
opponent-dependent confidence in performance and intrinsic opponent-dependent attitudes towards
competition as the most likely drivers: women could be less confident about their performance in a
competition against men, or have a more deeply rooted, intrinsic aversion to competing against men.
Such a specific response to the opponent’s gender can, in turn, be partly determined by the culture in
which people grow up (Gneezy, Leonard and List, 2009; Andersen et al., 2013; Booth et al., 2019;
Zhang, 2019).
Research into the effect of social class and ethnicity on competitiveness suggest that gender
differences in competitiveness—including those identified in the present study—may derive from a
more general phenomenon, where willingness to compete relates to social power and status. Almås
et al. (2016b) find that gender differences in competitiveness arise between boys and girls from
families with a high socioeconomic status only, and not between those who are from families with a
low socioeconomic status. Siddique and Vlassopoulos (2019) report that people from an ethnic
minority group are more likely to compete when their competitors are all co-ethnic than when their
competitors are predominantly from the majority group.
Regardless of the possible psychological mechanisms, the finding that women avoid competing against
men has the important implication that male dominance in a professional environment becomes selfperpetuating. This is especially the case if there is strategic interaction, where those who compete are
better off when others abstain from competing. In such a setting, women can expect more pushback
from both male and female competitors. At the higher rungs of the career ladder, where
overrepresentation of men and strategic interaction are both ubiquitous, affirmative action may be
necessary to alter the status quo.
The present paper examined gender differences in willingness to compete for high stakes, using a TV
game show where the winner of an elimination competition plays a game of chance worth hundreds
of thousands of euros. The amounts that are at stake in this real-life setting are much closer to the
sums involved in promotion competitions at the top of the labor market than the financial rewards
that are commonly employed in laboratory experiments.
We focused on two different games. In the first, contestants choose between competing in the next
elimination game and opting out for a prize. This decision resembles the tournament-entry decision
that subjects typically make in lab experiments. In line with the picture that emerges from the
experimental literature, we find that women are twice as likely as men to avoid the competition. The
comparatively high opt-out rate of women, however, derives entirely from situations where they will
face predominantly male opponents. This suggests that women have a particular dislike of competing
against men, rather than a more general dislike of competition. In this non-strategic game, men do not
appear to condition their behavior on the gender of their opponents.
In the second game one question determines the last elimination, unless one of the two remaining
contestants voluntarily accepts an opt-out prize. This head-to-head game is relatively complex,
because the optimal choice depends on the anticipated behavior of the opponent. The results show
that both genders avoid competing against a male opponent in this strategic setting. The same pattern
arises in the strategic game analyzed in the Appendix. This pattern confirms the result for the first
game that women avoid competing against men, and suggests that in strategic interactions men
anticipate a lower willingness to compete among their female opponents. In line with the results for
the first game, there is no evidence of a main effect of gender on competitiveness.
Altogether, the results confirm that gender differences in willingness to compete also occur in
situations where the stakes are very high, but they also indicate that the stereotypical image and
widely-held belief that women are less competitive than men is too simplistic. The findings show the
importance of the gender of competitors and of the presence of strategic interaction: women appear
to dislike competing against men, and men appear to exploit this when there is strategic interaction.
Hitherto, the literature on gender differences in willingness to compete has largely ignored these two
factors. Exceptions are Booth and Nolen (2012) and Geraldes (2018), who similarly find that women
avoid competing against men. Such a dislike is in line with evidence that women perform worse when
they compete against men (Gneezy, Niederle and Rustichini, 2003; Günther et al., 2010; Backus et al.,
2016; de Sousa and Hollard, 2016; Booth, Cardona-Sosa and Nolen, 2018; Booth and Yamamura, 2018).
Strategic interaction is typically ruled out by design in willingness-to-compete experiments.
Research somewhat removed from the willingness-to-compete literature indirectly supports our
conclusion about the importance of opponent gender in strategic interactions. Babcock et al. (2017)
show that women are more likely than men to volunteer for an undesirable task when interacting in
mixed-gender groups, but not when interacting in single-gender groups. Booth and Yamamura (2018)
study Japanese speedboat races and find that men adopt a more aggressive racing style in mixedgender races than in single-gender races, whereas women act less aggressively in mixed-gender races
than in single-gender races. Hernandez-Arenaz and Iriberri (2018) investigate bargaining behavior in a
Spanish TV game show and find that women ask less from men than from women.
Our setting differs in a number of ways from that of a traditional laboratory experiment. In addition to
the markedly higher stakes, the subject pool that we observe is much more diverse, and because of
the presence of a large audience and cameras, our contestants’ decisions are observed by many and
subject to considerable public scrutiny. A benefit of the diverse pool of contestants is that we can also
explore how competitiveness varies with age. We consistently find a u-shaped relation, with people
who are in their forties displaying the lowest opt-out propensity. Mayr et al. (2012) find a similar
relation between age and competitiveness among subjects in an incentivized experiment. Flory et al.
(2018) and Buser, Niederle and Oosterbeek (2020), however, report different age patterns.
A benefit of the public nature of the competition, is that this feature is shared by many consequential
real world competitions. In the political arena and upper echelons of the corporate world, for example,
people face considerable public scrutiny when they compete for top positions. This is another
argument for why our naturally occurring setting is much more similar to such real-world situations
than anonymous, low-stakes laboratory experiments. Because opting out of the competition ends
public observability and choosing to compete extends it, a difference in the attitudes of men and
women towards public observability would obfuscate the relation between gender and
competitiveness. To the best of our knowledge, the only paper that studies the impact of public
observability on competitiveness is Buser, Ranehill and van Veldhuizen (2019). They find suggestive
evidence that public observability increases men’s willingness to compete, but conclude that public
observability does not alter the magnitude of the gender gap in willingness to compete in an
economically or statistically significant way. This possible confound also occurs in many real-life
settings, but cannot explain why women display a dislike of competing against men and why men are
more competitive when they face women in a strategic setting.
Similar to the tasks that are typically used in willingness-to-compete experiments, the questions that
are central in the elimination competition are often numerical or arithmetic in nature. This similarity
facilitates the comparison of our results with those of previous studies. Research on competitiveness
often intentionally uses such tasks because mathematics is a stereotypically male area, which brings
the research closer to competitive situations in male-dominated workplaces or male-connotated areas
such as management (Niederle and Vesterlund, 2011). Although we cannot entirely rule out that our
results are partly driven by a gender difference in the ability to answer the questions, none of the
additional analyses of our data provide evidence that the quiz questions actually favor men. Second,
based on research into math performance and research into recall of factual information, there is little
reason to believe that such a difference holds true for the general population (Herlitz et al., 1997;
Nilsson, 2003; Hyde et al., 2008; Lindberg et al., 2010). Last, even if any gender difference would exist
among the initial pool of contestants, it would be relatively small among those we study because
weaker contestants are less likely to reach the stages of interest.
Of course, contestants may have held non-rational expectations about their own ability and that of
others, possibly inspired by stereotypical beliefs about the performance of men and women on math
questions. Indeed, in experimental work that uses a neutral or stereotypically female type of task,
competitiveness differences between men and women are sometimes, but not always, weak or absent
(Große and Riener, 2010; Shurchkov, 2012; Dreber, von Essen and Ranehill, 2014; Wozniak, Harbaugh
and Mayr, 2014). Stereotype-biased beliefs about performance may explain why women display a
relatively low propensity to compete against men in all the games that we study, and why men display
a relatively high propensity to compete against women when the game is strategic. This explanation,
however, is not supported by the behavior of men in the first game: there is no evidence that men are
especially eager to compete against women. If anything, men are more likely to opt out against women
than against men in this game.
A possible concern about our findings is that their generalizability might be negatively affected by
selection effects. Selection procedures are inevitable in any lab experiment or field setting, and could
potentially bias comparisons of the behavior of men and women (Larkin and Pines, 2003; Reback and
Stowe, 2011; Hogarth, Karelaia and Trujillo, 2012). Unlike contestants in most other game shows,
however, contestants in our elimination competition do not need to self-select into auditions and are
not screened and then selected by producers prior to their participation. All have won their ticket
through the popular Dutch Postcode Lottery. Even for competition-averse individuals, using this ticket
is attractive: in addition to the lucrative possibility of becoming the finalist, contestants can win many
other large prizes. Nevertheless, subjects in our study are not selected perfectly at random: all are
lottery players who were able to attend the recording, and couples might send the best or most
competitive of the two of them. Still, as a group the subjects in our study do resemble a cross-section
of the general population much more closely than subjects in most lab experiments and other field
studies do. More importantly, it is not clear how selection mechanisms could explain that the
competitiveness of men and women depends on the gender of their opponent.
Our study finds that women avoid competition against men, but remains silent on the underlying
causes of this behavior. According to the literature, differences in reluctance to compete can be driven
by differences in risk attitudes, (over)confidence, and intrinsic attitudes towards competition.
However, even in controlled experiments, and even without strategic interaction and consideration of
the role of the gender of opponents, careful disentangling of the possible determinants of
competitiveness has proven to be methodologically challenging (van Veldhuizen, 2018; Gillen,
Snowberg and Yariv, 2019). Our field data is not rich enough for delving into the possible explanations,
but it seems implausible that risk preferences depend on the gender of the opponents. This leaves
opponent-dependent confidence in performance and intrinsic opponent-dependent attitudes towards
competition as the most likely drivers: women could be less confident about their performance in a
competition against men, or have a more deeply rooted, intrinsic aversion to competing against men.
Such a specific response to the opponent’s gender can, in turn, be partly determined by the culture in
which people grow up (Gneezy, Leonard and List, 2009; Andersen et al., 2013; Booth et al., 2019;
Zhang, 2019).
Research into the effect of social class and ethnicity on competitiveness suggest that gender
differences in competitiveness—including those identified in the present study—may derive from a
more general phenomenon, where willingness to compete relates to social power and status. Almås
et al. (2016b) find that gender differences in competitiveness arise between boys and girls from
families with a high socioeconomic status only, and not between those who are from families with a
low socioeconomic status. Siddique and Vlassopoulos (2019) report that people from an ethnic
minority group are more likely to compete when their competitors are all co-ethnic than when their
competitors are predominantly from the majority group.
Regardless of the possible psychological mechanisms, the finding that women avoid competing against
men has the important implication that male dominance in a professional environment becomes selfperpetuating. This is especially the case if there is strategic interaction, where those who compete are
better off when others abstain from competing. In such a setting, women can expect more pushback
from both male and female competitors. At the higher rungs of the career ladder, where
overrepresentation of men and strategic interaction are both ubiquitous, affirmative action may be
necessary to alter the status quo.
Saturday, February 22, 2020
Sophie Lewis: We Can't Have a Feminist Future Without Abolishing the Family, which create the infrastructure for capitalism, exploiting people of color and disowning queer children
We Can't Have a Feminist Future Without Abolishing the Family. Marie Solis. Vice, Feb 21 2020. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/qjdzwb/sophie-lewis-feminist-abolishing-the-family-full-surrogacy-now
The feminist thinker Sophie Lewis has a radical proposal for what comes next.
[Full text, photos, lots of links, at the URI above.]
A little more than two weeks before I planned to meet the feminist theorist Sophie Lewis, her mother died. She had been diagnosed with stage 4 cancer in March, requiring Lewis to travel back and forth between her home in Philadelphia and a hospital in the UK—a journey she technically wasn’t allowed to make due to the pending status of her green card. When her mother passed away in late November, she did so thousands of miles away, while Lewis and her brother sang the Taylor Swift song “Safe and Sound” to her over Skype.
Earlier that month, at a lecture in Lower Manhattan hosted by the arts journal e-flux, Lewis, who is 31, reflected on what some might see as an obvious irony to her crisscrossing the ocean to care for her ailing mother: Verso Books had just published her first book, Full Surrogacy Now, a polemic that calls for abolishing the family.
“2019, in addition to its more general geopolitical ghoulishness, has been a difficult one for this particular family abolitionist,” Lewis told the audience of about two dozen. “It's been surreal because the temporal coincidence of the Full Surrogacy launch with this unprecedented requirement for me—that I be at my closest bio-relative’s bedside—brought the stakes of my subject matter to life with almost unbearable intensity.”
The book, and its core premise, has gained widespread attention, from leftist publications like Jacobin and The Nation all the way to Fox News’s Tucker Carlson, who dedicated a June segment on his prime-time show to tearing it down. Recently, the columnist David Brooks declared in The Atlantic that the “nuclear family was a mistake.” The piece inspired a niche version of a popular Drake meme, with the singer shaking his head in disapproval at Brooks’ column in one frame, and smiling at Full Surrogacy Now in the next. (“I gave up after two minutes admittedly, but let it be known that I (incredulous) started reading it,” Lewis tweeted of the Atlantic piece. “Like....have we reached David Brooks?”)
When Lewis demands “full surrogacy now,” she isn’t talking about commercial surrogacy, or ”Surrogacy™,” as she puts it. Instead, she uses the surrogacy industry to build the argument that all gestation is work because of the immense physical and emotional labor it requires of those who do it. She often refers to pregnancy as an “extreme sport.”
If all forms of pregnancy count as work, we can take a clear-eyed look at our current working conditions: “It is a wonder we let fetuses inside us,” she says at the start of her book, citing the roughly 1,000 people in the United States who still die as a result of pregnancy and childbirth each year—mostly poor women and women of color. “This situation is social, not simply ‘natural.’ Things are like this for political and economic reasons: we made them this way.”
And so we can also make them different, Lewis argues. She imagines a future where the labor of making new human beings is shared among all of us, “mother” no longer being a natural category, but instead something we can choose.
At this point, “surrogacy” becomes somewhat metaphorical: Lewis isn’t asking that we all agree to physically gestate fetuses that aren’t biologically ours. Her radical proposition is that we practice “full surrogacy” by abolishing the family. That means caring for each other not in discrete private units (also known as nuclear households), but rather within larger systems of care that can provide us with the love and support we can’t always get from blood relations—something Lewis knows all too well.
Even those of us who might call our family situations relatively “happy” should sign onto this project of demolishing their essential structure, Lewis says. Nuclear households create the infrastructure for capitalism, passing wealth and property down family trees, concentrating it in the hands of the few at the top of our class hierarchy. Maintaining the traditional family structure over time has also meant exploiting people of color and disowning queer children.
Lewis imagines a future where the labor of making new human beings is shared among all of us, “mother” no longer being a natural category, but instead something we can choose.
Lewis isn’t concerned with incremental changes within our existing systems—Full Surrogacy Now, for example, doesn’t make any concrete policy proposals or spend time worrying over issues like the gender pay gap and paid family leave. She’s concerned with much bolder possibilities: In Lewis's utopian future, the family as we know it no longer exists. Everyone, regardless of gender, is a surrogate; we mother each other.
And so, no, Lewis didn’t find that looking after her sick mother contradicted her stance on the nuclear family. If we had achieved the ends of family abolition already, there would have been a vast network of people to care for her mother in those final months of her life, not just Lewis and her brother.
“Nothing could have better illustrated the impossibility, the unjustness, and the structural scarcity—for all concerned—baked into the heart of the private nuclear household,” she said.
When I visited Lewis in Philadelphia in December, we met at a cafe across the street from her apartment around 1 pm. We’d planned to meet earlier, but that morning Lewis had texted me asking if we could push back our breakfast date a couple of hours—she’d stayed out until 5 am dancing at her partner Vicky Osterweil’s birthday party. She walked into the cafe looking fresh and buoyant, her hair a brilliant shade of orange, which she had recently dyed to match the walls of her mother’s apartment.
Over the loud hum of families eating Sunday brunch, Lewis, told me about her somewhat unlikely path to writing a book on surrogacy and family abolitionist theory. We started at the beginning: Lewis was born in Vienna, Austria, where her parents had been working as journalists, but she spent most of her childhood in Geneva, Switzerland, and parts of France, moving around often for her father’s job, which she said often took precedence over her mother’s job, or her family’s other needs.
This arrangement was an indicator of other, darker family dynamics, according to Lewis. One of her earliest family memories was of an argument she had gotten into with her father when she was just three years old: Lewis and her brother were both singing the Queen of the Night’s part in The Magic Flute, an opera they loved watching as children. Her father scolded them both, telling them that they shouldn’t sing the Queen’s part because the King had banished her, and she’d deserved it. Lewis sobbed. “If you skip forward seven years or so, he’s asking me: Why hasn’t there ever been a female Mozart? Why hasn’t there been a female Shakespeare?” Lewis said.
Years later, her father doubted Lewis when she told him she was raped at 13, writing to her partner in an email that rape is “good for the feminist CV.”
She left the house the first chance she got.
Lewis studied English literature at Oxford as an undergraduate, and then received a master’s in the university’s environmental policy program. To her chagrin, what had historically been a rather radical program, led by a Marxist professor, had become one run by an employee of the World Bank; a representative from the oil and gas conglomerate BP delivered a lecture on the first day of classes. When Lewis told the professor she’d been under the impression that the program would be about challenging the corporate interests BP represented, Lewis said the professor told her: “You can’t just change the world.”
Lewis completed the master’s, but took her utopian visions elsewhere. She organized a university reading group dedicated to Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto, a complicated essay that imagines a feminist future inhabited by hybrid creatures engaged in political struggle against the racism, misogyny, and colonialism that formed them. Lewis had first discovered the text when she was just 16, using dial-up internet.
“I didn’t understand shit obviously,” she said over breakfast. “But there’s a soul in her writing that I found very exciting, and I felt a queer kinship with it. It was very comforting.”
Lewis went on to study human geography—a field that examines how humans interact with their environment—and write a thesis on gestational labor, all the while turning over ideas in her head about labor, gender, and nature and how they intersect.
In Lewis's utopian future, the family as we know it no longer exists. Everyone, regardless of gender, is a surrogate; we mother each other.
Much of the writing Lewis did during and immediately after her schooling foretells Full Surrogacy Now. But she also applied her critical feminist eye to film and television, writing about Nymphomaniac, Phantom Thread, The Handmaid’s Tale Hulu adaption, and a British reality dating show called First Dates. It was this last piece of criticism that caught the attention of Verso editor Rosie Warren.
“Review” isn’t quite the right word for what Lewis does in these essays. She’s not evaluating the artistic success of these works so much as she is reading them closely to understand how we are living in the world as it is, and how we might go about making it otherwise. Phantom Thread, for example, isn’t a wry love story, but proof that romance is ”a series of atrocities people perpetrate on one another in the name of love and art, for the sake of class power.” And The Handmaid’s Tale—a favorite subject of criticism for Lewis—is hardly a feminist dystopia for its cosplaying fans. Rather it is a feminist utopia, portraying a fantasy of solidarity where all women experience exactly the same form of oppression, regardless of other identity categories like race or class.
Watching First Dates, it occurred to Lewis that heterosexual dating in real life very much resembled the staged, stylized version of it that contestants participate in on the show: “‘Dating,’ as it is currently known and practised, casts ordinary people as perfectible investment opportunities in competition with each other across myriad platforms,” like OkCupid and Tinder, she wrote.
“Verso read the essay and the editor was like, ‘The incredible thing about your writing is that it’s like you’re an alien who has come down to tell us the bad news about heterosexual culture,’” Lewis recalled. “And that’s why they gave me the book.”
Warren laughed when I recited this over the phone. Lewis’s approach to culture “allows you to see things as they are,” she said. “It’s such a wonderful feeling to have someone point out things you don’t even realize you’ve accepted as ‘normal.’”
Lewis appears to be at her most excited when she’s turning some cultural artifact inside out. Between bites of mushroom pizza one evening, she told me animatedly that she and Osterweil had figured out the secret to understanding Gilmore Girls, which they had both recently watched together for the first time. The show, a family drama from the aughts, casts men as marginal characters while the women drive the action, she explained.
“All of the women are men and all of the men are women,” Osterweil added.
When Full Surrogacy Now came out in May, conservatives were aghast. Shortly after its release, Fox News host Tucker Carlson invited Lewis onto his show; when she declined, Carlson moved forward with the segment anyway, airing a YouTube clip of Lewis calling abortion “a form of killing” (a pro-abortion rights statement she stands by). What followed was a torrent of internet abuse, largely from right-wing viewers who saw Lewis as confirmation of all the insidious things they suspected feminism of to begin with: She was “Satan” or “worse than Satan” or “feminism’s true agenda, unmasked!” as Lewis later recalled.
But Lewis’s proposal for dismantling the nuclear family was met with befuddlement from left-leaning outlets too. In a review for The New Yorker, contributor Jessica Weisberg—though otherwise sympathetic to Lewis’s position—argues that Full Surrogacy Now failed to account for that “mysterious variety of love” only biological motherhood can offer. Even at Jacobin, a socialist magazine, writer Nivedita Majumdar declared that the “real path to liberation isn’t the call to ‘abolish the family,’” condemning Lewis’s “dogmatic hostility to the parent-child relation.”
Lewis has found that when she talks about family abolition people respond as though she’s “not even speaking English anymore … like [I’m] not even making syntactical sense,” she said at the e-flux lecture. “Real brain explosion emoji to the max.”
Abolishing the family may not have ever been a mainstream proposition, but for a stretch of time in the 1960s and 70s it was a fairly well-known one. Arguments for family abolition date back to Marx and Engels (and indeed, even further, to Plato), but the radical feminist Shulamith Firestone is credited with popularizing the concept on the modern-day left. In her foundational 1970 manifesto The Dialectic of Sex, she identifies the biological family as the basis for women’s oppression because it establishes women as an underclass by forcing them to bear the brunt of gestational labor.
To be a radical feminist during these years would have meant being familiar with this text and its central demand, which appeared in leftist pamphlets and literature. Yet just a decade later, any advocacy for family abolition had all but disappeared from feminist discourse. Instead, the movement chose to embrace family values, preferring to fight for the reform—rather than the annihilation—of the nuclear family structure.
In the late 70s and 80s, liberal groups and individual feminist leaders argued that family was the new frontier in women’s struggle for equality, given the gains women had recently made in the workforce. “Now that women are beginning to have an active voice in the economy and politics, the nation’s agenda may begin truly to include the family,” said Betty Friedan, the author of The Feminine Mystique, during a keynote address for the 1979 National Assembly on the Future of the Family, which was hosted by the National Organization for Women.
The family, Friedan said, was no longer “enemy territory” for feminists.
When Lewis was writing Full Surrogacy Now, she didn’t give much thought to how her renewed calls for family abolition might be received in 2019. “I think some people take my book as a really intentional, purposeful attempt at pissing everybody off,” she told me with a laugh. “But I don’t feel like I’m strategic; I don’t think my skill is seeing what everyone else is saying and making a calculated intervention.”
Nonetheless, Lewis has chosen a good time to intervene. Over the last decade, feminism has been seemingly emptied of any remaining, actual politics in order for it to be subsumed by brands marketing empowerment. In a post- Lean In climate, still very much dominated by “girlbosses” and “She-E-Os,” mainstream feminism can appear as though it has been completely divorced from its radical roots. Contemporary debates around gender roles, women’s labor, and sexual politics often seem to circle the same arguments feminist theorists had decades ago, but rarely acknowledge that this is the case. (Her next project is tackling some of these contemporary feminist archetypes in a book she's working on now, tentatively titled Feminism of Fools.)
Lewis’s call to abolish the family is also a call to re-energize and repoliticize feminism.
It would be wrong to credit Lewis with rediscovering figures like Firestone. But while these second-wave thinkers have not by any means been forgotten, their early work is more often cited than it is actively engaged with.
“At this point, the radical interventions of these feminist scholars and thinkers happened 30 to 40 years ago,” said Natasha Lennard, who is the author of Being Numerous: Essays on Non-Fascist Life, as well as a close friend of Lewis’s. “There’s been this static and hagiographic upholding of these ideas, but not a lot of pushing them forward, at least not in the public intellectual sphere.”
This kind of reverence is anathema to Lewis. When I asked her what contemporary feminists she admired, she named the queer feminist theorist Sara Ahmed, anti-work feminist Kathi Weeks, and the founding members of the Wages for Housework movement as a few examples, but said it’s “a mistake” to have feminist heroes. “You make them and in doing so you’re platforming someone who then is kind of cursed by that,” Lewis said. “They no longer keep learning and growing to the same degree,” potentially hampering new feminist thinking.
Haraway is an exception. Forgetting herself, Lewis will sometimes refer to Haraway as her “idol.”
Lewis’s call to abolish the family is also a call to re-energize and repoliticize feminism.
Even so, Haraway doesn’t get a free pass. Though Lewis builds on the theory found in Cyborg Manifesto and other early Haraway texts, she has critiqued some of the scholar’s more recent argumentation. In 2017, Lewis penned an essay for Viewpoint Magazine arguing that Haraway appeared to betray her own principles in her latest book, Staying With the Trouble. In Cyborg Manifesto, Haraway envisions a utopian post-gender future created by every member of the human species; but in Staying With the Trouble, Haraway calls for a dramatic reduction of the population in order to reduce humanity’s effects on the climate—a cynical turn toward misanthropy, Lewis wrote.
To Lewis’s surprise, she received an email from Haraway herself not long after the piece went up, inviting her into conversation with several other big-name feminists who were cc’ed. Haraway told Lewis that she had no choice but to “contend” with what Lewis had written: a well-argued piece of criticism. (Haraway told me she wasn’t available for interview due to travel.)
Lewis is bashful about this, but Haraway has made it clear that she sees Lewis as continuing the legacy of her work, even as she challenges it. Much of Lewis’s writing is fundamentally Harawayan in the sense that while at times very dense, it is filled with imagination and metaphor.
“Surrogates to the front!” Lewis exclaims toward the end of her book. “By surrogates I mean those comradely gestators, midwives, and other sundry interveners in the more slippery moments of social reproduction: repairing boats; swimming across borders; blockading lake-threatening pipelines; carrying; miscarrying.”
Afew hours after our breakfast, Lewis invited me to see Queen & Slim with her, Osterweil, and their friend Zach at a theater near the University of Pennsylvania's campus. The film—a drama about a young Black couple on the run after fatally shooting a police officer in self-defense—is not, on its face, about the nuclear family. But after spending just one afternoon with Lewis, I couldn’t help but think of it that way.
Slim is preoccupied by his “legacy,” which he initially sees as something that can exist only through a biological lineage. But at the end of the film, having made the choice to abandon his family to start a new life with Queen, he tells her that she’s his legacy.
Lewis said this happens all the time, this experience of watching something and noticing family abolitionist subtext. It’s probably even happened watching “some superhero movie,” she joked.
“Vicky always digs me in the ribs when we’re watching something that has to do with non-nuclear kinship,” Lewis told me the next day at a ramen restaurant near the office of her therapist, whom she had met with before lunch. “I already know when she’s going to do it. She’s like, ‘Uh?! Uh?!’”
Another place Lewis has found family abolitionist themes is in Ari Aster’s horror films, Hereditary and Midsommar, which she wrote about in August for Commune. The essay is Lewis at her best, weaving together the sharp analysis that caught Verso's eye with her idiosyncratic humor and wit. But it is also a somber look at the nuclear household of her childhood, of which we only get a glimpse in Full Surrogacy Now: Though Lewis may have come to her theories about family abolition and surrogacy intellectually, her own family upbringing has played a role that is difficult to ignore.
In the piece, Lewis tells us that her father taught her and her brother to treat their mother with contempt. When her parents separated, they literally divided the house in half, sealing off doorways and even creating a second kitchen, sectioned off from the original by an improvised partition.
“In other words, I know the family not to be a benign ‘default' situation,’” Lewis writes. “I’ve always known.”
In the wake of her mother’s death, she’d been contending with these family tensions once again. Lewis’s dad was blaming her for one of her mother’s long-ago suicide attempts, and sending nasty messages to her and her brother on Facebook and through email.
But even absent her father’s interventions, growing up, Lewis’s relationship with her mother wasn’t of the “mysterious variety of love” sort. This made grieving her death difficult, especially when so many people seemed to consider the loss of one’s mother—one’s “closest bio-relative,” as Lewis had put it in her November lecture—to be the greatest loss one can suffer.
“People have been saying to me, ‘Love yourself in the days ahead like she loved you,’” Lewis said. “And I’m like, ‘Oh my god, that’s a terrible idea!’ I need to do a lot better than that and so do all my friends.”
On the last day we spent together, I visited Lewis at her home. Originally, she was going to take me on a short walking tour of her neighborhood, but it was raining and gloomy outside, so we settled into two armchairs in her living room. She made us green tea, pouring mine into a mug that read “I’ve got 99 problems and white heteronormative patriarchy is basically all of them.” To my delight, her cat, a small tabby named Robespierre—after the French revolutionary—jumped onto my lap.
Lewis described her slice of West Philadelphia as a “village”: It includes Gold Standard, the quaint cafe where we first met, a tattoo parlor, a “social-justicey” yoga studio, a community garden, a “punk” hair salon, and an antique shop where Lewis and Osterweil had a $50 voucher, a wedding gift they still hadn’t used more than a year after they married. Days earlier, hunting for a seat at Gold Standard, we spotted someone leaving who turned out to be a friend of Lewis: They told her that they planned to sign up for the Brooklyn Institute class she is teaching this month at the anarchist bookstore Wooden Shoe Books.
Shortly after we found seats facing the window, we waved to Osterweil, who was smoking a cigarette as she crossed the street.
"I know the family not to be a benign ‘default' situation. I’ve always known.”
Sitting beside me in her apartment, Lewis showed me a scrapbook her mother had made, filled with photos of her playing with buckets of water and grinning at the beach—a reminder of her own arguments in Full Surrogacy Now that we should, figuratively, return to the “wateriness” in which we were gestated. It is at this time, Lewis says, when we are suspended in amniotic fluid, that the boundaries of our physical selves are in flux. To acknowledge that this is also true in life—that we are all inextricably connected to each other, biological family or not—would create the conditions for “radical kinship.”
She also showed me one of the zines she and Osterweil gave to guests at their wedding, which include speeches from friends and promises to each other. The latter could not properly be called “vows,” because they are in fact disavowals: of the institution of marriage, the biological family, and the dysfunction that both can breed. (They had a more traditional ceremony in Boston, at the request of Osterweil’s mother.)
To spend any amount of time with Lewis is to feel that the world she imagines is nearby. Whether we realize it or not, many of us are already familiar with her arguments for abolishing the family. When we talk about the prevalence of domestic violence and child abuse—when some of us find ourselves inside family units that perpetrate these crimes—we acknowledge that, in horror movie parlance, the violence is coming from inside the family.
We may not call it “family abolition” or “full surrogacy,” but many people have begun to erect the caregiving communes Lewis wants to see realized. Queer people build “chosen families,” as do other marginalized groups who depend on each other for their survival. And even within traditional nuclear households, parents might find themselves saying that it “takes a village” to raise children—an acknowledgement that it’s not a job one can do on their own.
In many ways, Lewis shows us, the family has already been abolished. At the same time, the “open-source, fully collaborative gestation” she imagines remains on a distant horizon. Riffing on a famous quote from the philosopher Fredric Jameson, Lewis considers that “if it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, it is perhaps easier still to imagine the end of capitalism than the end of the family.”
Nonetheless, Lewis sees glimmers of this future everywhere. When she is surrounded by her partner and her friends, she sees that she is “mothered by many.” They are not her biological relatives, but they are each other’s kin in an even truer sense: They have chosen to care for each other without the dictates of the nuclear family structure. In Lewis’ feminist utopia, family has not vanished; it has become more wild, more abundant, and less constrained.
Just a few days after her mother died, Lewis confused a woman crossing the street for her. “It provoked, in the moment, a torrent of intense tears,” Lewis wrote on Twitter. “But now I’m thinking about it and realizing she hasn’t just evaporated. She’ll always be around even after she stops haunting (e.g.) pedestrian crossings in Philadelphia.”
Mothers, of course, are everywhere.
The feminist thinker Sophie Lewis has a radical proposal for what comes next.
[Full text, photos, lots of links, at the URI above.]
A little more than two weeks before I planned to meet the feminist theorist Sophie Lewis, her mother died. She had been diagnosed with stage 4 cancer in March, requiring Lewis to travel back and forth between her home in Philadelphia and a hospital in the UK—a journey she technically wasn’t allowed to make due to the pending status of her green card. When her mother passed away in late November, she did so thousands of miles away, while Lewis and her brother sang the Taylor Swift song “Safe and Sound” to her over Skype.
Earlier that month, at a lecture in Lower Manhattan hosted by the arts journal e-flux, Lewis, who is 31, reflected on what some might see as an obvious irony to her crisscrossing the ocean to care for her ailing mother: Verso Books had just published her first book, Full Surrogacy Now, a polemic that calls for abolishing the family.
“2019, in addition to its more general geopolitical ghoulishness, has been a difficult one for this particular family abolitionist,” Lewis told the audience of about two dozen. “It's been surreal because the temporal coincidence of the Full Surrogacy launch with this unprecedented requirement for me—that I be at my closest bio-relative’s bedside—brought the stakes of my subject matter to life with almost unbearable intensity.”
The book, and its core premise, has gained widespread attention, from leftist publications like Jacobin and The Nation all the way to Fox News’s Tucker Carlson, who dedicated a June segment on his prime-time show to tearing it down. Recently, the columnist David Brooks declared in The Atlantic that the “nuclear family was a mistake.” The piece inspired a niche version of a popular Drake meme, with the singer shaking his head in disapproval at Brooks’ column in one frame, and smiling at Full Surrogacy Now in the next. (“I gave up after two minutes admittedly, but let it be known that I (incredulous) started reading it,” Lewis tweeted of the Atlantic piece. “Like....have we reached David Brooks?”)
When Lewis demands “full surrogacy now,” she isn’t talking about commercial surrogacy, or ”Surrogacy™,” as she puts it. Instead, she uses the surrogacy industry to build the argument that all gestation is work because of the immense physical and emotional labor it requires of those who do it. She often refers to pregnancy as an “extreme sport.”
If all forms of pregnancy count as work, we can take a clear-eyed look at our current working conditions: “It is a wonder we let fetuses inside us,” she says at the start of her book, citing the roughly 1,000 people in the United States who still die as a result of pregnancy and childbirth each year—mostly poor women and women of color. “This situation is social, not simply ‘natural.’ Things are like this for political and economic reasons: we made them this way.”
And so we can also make them different, Lewis argues. She imagines a future where the labor of making new human beings is shared among all of us, “mother” no longer being a natural category, but instead something we can choose.
At this point, “surrogacy” becomes somewhat metaphorical: Lewis isn’t asking that we all agree to physically gestate fetuses that aren’t biologically ours. Her radical proposition is that we practice “full surrogacy” by abolishing the family. That means caring for each other not in discrete private units (also known as nuclear households), but rather within larger systems of care that can provide us with the love and support we can’t always get from blood relations—something Lewis knows all too well.
Even those of us who might call our family situations relatively “happy” should sign onto this project of demolishing their essential structure, Lewis says. Nuclear households create the infrastructure for capitalism, passing wealth and property down family trees, concentrating it in the hands of the few at the top of our class hierarchy. Maintaining the traditional family structure over time has also meant exploiting people of color and disowning queer children.
Lewis imagines a future where the labor of making new human beings is shared among all of us, “mother” no longer being a natural category, but instead something we can choose.
Lewis isn’t concerned with incremental changes within our existing systems—Full Surrogacy Now, for example, doesn’t make any concrete policy proposals or spend time worrying over issues like the gender pay gap and paid family leave. She’s concerned with much bolder possibilities: In Lewis's utopian future, the family as we know it no longer exists. Everyone, regardless of gender, is a surrogate; we mother each other.
And so, no, Lewis didn’t find that looking after her sick mother contradicted her stance on the nuclear family. If we had achieved the ends of family abolition already, there would have been a vast network of people to care for her mother in those final months of her life, not just Lewis and her brother.
“Nothing could have better illustrated the impossibility, the unjustness, and the structural scarcity—for all concerned—baked into the heart of the private nuclear household,” she said.
When I visited Lewis in Philadelphia in December, we met at a cafe across the street from her apartment around 1 pm. We’d planned to meet earlier, but that morning Lewis had texted me asking if we could push back our breakfast date a couple of hours—she’d stayed out until 5 am dancing at her partner Vicky Osterweil’s birthday party. She walked into the cafe looking fresh and buoyant, her hair a brilliant shade of orange, which she had recently dyed to match the walls of her mother’s apartment.
Over the loud hum of families eating Sunday brunch, Lewis, told me about her somewhat unlikely path to writing a book on surrogacy and family abolitionist theory. We started at the beginning: Lewis was born in Vienna, Austria, where her parents had been working as journalists, but she spent most of her childhood in Geneva, Switzerland, and parts of France, moving around often for her father’s job, which she said often took precedence over her mother’s job, or her family’s other needs.
This arrangement was an indicator of other, darker family dynamics, according to Lewis. One of her earliest family memories was of an argument she had gotten into with her father when she was just three years old: Lewis and her brother were both singing the Queen of the Night’s part in The Magic Flute, an opera they loved watching as children. Her father scolded them both, telling them that they shouldn’t sing the Queen’s part because the King had banished her, and she’d deserved it. Lewis sobbed. “If you skip forward seven years or so, he’s asking me: Why hasn’t there ever been a female Mozart? Why hasn’t there been a female Shakespeare?” Lewis said.
Years later, her father doubted Lewis when she told him she was raped at 13, writing to her partner in an email that rape is “good for the feminist CV.”
She left the house the first chance she got.
Lewis studied English literature at Oxford as an undergraduate, and then received a master’s in the university’s environmental policy program. To her chagrin, what had historically been a rather radical program, led by a Marxist professor, had become one run by an employee of the World Bank; a representative from the oil and gas conglomerate BP delivered a lecture on the first day of classes. When Lewis told the professor she’d been under the impression that the program would be about challenging the corporate interests BP represented, Lewis said the professor told her: “You can’t just change the world.”
Lewis completed the master’s, but took her utopian visions elsewhere. She organized a university reading group dedicated to Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto, a complicated essay that imagines a feminist future inhabited by hybrid creatures engaged in political struggle against the racism, misogyny, and colonialism that formed them. Lewis had first discovered the text when she was just 16, using dial-up internet.
“I didn’t understand shit obviously,” she said over breakfast. “But there’s a soul in her writing that I found very exciting, and I felt a queer kinship with it. It was very comforting.”
Lewis went on to study human geography—a field that examines how humans interact with their environment—and write a thesis on gestational labor, all the while turning over ideas in her head about labor, gender, and nature and how they intersect.
In Lewis's utopian future, the family as we know it no longer exists. Everyone, regardless of gender, is a surrogate; we mother each other.
Much of the writing Lewis did during and immediately after her schooling foretells Full Surrogacy Now. But she also applied her critical feminist eye to film and television, writing about Nymphomaniac, Phantom Thread, The Handmaid’s Tale Hulu adaption, and a British reality dating show called First Dates. It was this last piece of criticism that caught the attention of Verso editor Rosie Warren.
“Review” isn’t quite the right word for what Lewis does in these essays. She’s not evaluating the artistic success of these works so much as she is reading them closely to understand how we are living in the world as it is, and how we might go about making it otherwise. Phantom Thread, for example, isn’t a wry love story, but proof that romance is ”a series of atrocities people perpetrate on one another in the name of love and art, for the sake of class power.” And The Handmaid’s Tale—a favorite subject of criticism for Lewis—is hardly a feminist dystopia for its cosplaying fans. Rather it is a feminist utopia, portraying a fantasy of solidarity where all women experience exactly the same form of oppression, regardless of other identity categories like race or class.
Watching First Dates, it occurred to Lewis that heterosexual dating in real life very much resembled the staged, stylized version of it that contestants participate in on the show: “‘Dating,’ as it is currently known and practised, casts ordinary people as perfectible investment opportunities in competition with each other across myriad platforms,” like OkCupid and Tinder, she wrote.
“Verso read the essay and the editor was like, ‘The incredible thing about your writing is that it’s like you’re an alien who has come down to tell us the bad news about heterosexual culture,’” Lewis recalled. “And that’s why they gave me the book.”
Warren laughed when I recited this over the phone. Lewis’s approach to culture “allows you to see things as they are,” she said. “It’s such a wonderful feeling to have someone point out things you don’t even realize you’ve accepted as ‘normal.’”
Lewis appears to be at her most excited when she’s turning some cultural artifact inside out. Between bites of mushroom pizza one evening, she told me animatedly that she and Osterweil had figured out the secret to understanding Gilmore Girls, which they had both recently watched together for the first time. The show, a family drama from the aughts, casts men as marginal characters while the women drive the action, she explained.
“All of the women are men and all of the men are women,” Osterweil added.
When Full Surrogacy Now came out in May, conservatives were aghast. Shortly after its release, Fox News host Tucker Carlson invited Lewis onto his show; when she declined, Carlson moved forward with the segment anyway, airing a YouTube clip of Lewis calling abortion “a form of killing” (a pro-abortion rights statement she stands by). What followed was a torrent of internet abuse, largely from right-wing viewers who saw Lewis as confirmation of all the insidious things they suspected feminism of to begin with: She was “Satan” or “worse than Satan” or “feminism’s true agenda, unmasked!” as Lewis later recalled.
But Lewis’s proposal for dismantling the nuclear family was met with befuddlement from left-leaning outlets too. In a review for The New Yorker, contributor Jessica Weisberg—though otherwise sympathetic to Lewis’s position—argues that Full Surrogacy Now failed to account for that “mysterious variety of love” only biological motherhood can offer. Even at Jacobin, a socialist magazine, writer Nivedita Majumdar declared that the “real path to liberation isn’t the call to ‘abolish the family,’” condemning Lewis’s “dogmatic hostility to the parent-child relation.”
Lewis has found that when she talks about family abolition people respond as though she’s “not even speaking English anymore … like [I’m] not even making syntactical sense,” she said at the e-flux lecture. “Real brain explosion emoji to the max.”
Abolishing the family may not have ever been a mainstream proposition, but for a stretch of time in the 1960s and 70s it was a fairly well-known one. Arguments for family abolition date back to Marx and Engels (and indeed, even further, to Plato), but the radical feminist Shulamith Firestone is credited with popularizing the concept on the modern-day left. In her foundational 1970 manifesto The Dialectic of Sex, she identifies the biological family as the basis for women’s oppression because it establishes women as an underclass by forcing them to bear the brunt of gestational labor.
To be a radical feminist during these years would have meant being familiar with this text and its central demand, which appeared in leftist pamphlets and literature. Yet just a decade later, any advocacy for family abolition had all but disappeared from feminist discourse. Instead, the movement chose to embrace family values, preferring to fight for the reform—rather than the annihilation—of the nuclear family structure.
In the late 70s and 80s, liberal groups and individual feminist leaders argued that family was the new frontier in women’s struggle for equality, given the gains women had recently made in the workforce. “Now that women are beginning to have an active voice in the economy and politics, the nation’s agenda may begin truly to include the family,” said Betty Friedan, the author of The Feminine Mystique, during a keynote address for the 1979 National Assembly on the Future of the Family, which was hosted by the National Organization for Women.
The family, Friedan said, was no longer “enemy territory” for feminists.
When Lewis was writing Full Surrogacy Now, she didn’t give much thought to how her renewed calls for family abolition might be received in 2019. “I think some people take my book as a really intentional, purposeful attempt at pissing everybody off,” she told me with a laugh. “But I don’t feel like I’m strategic; I don’t think my skill is seeing what everyone else is saying and making a calculated intervention.”
Nonetheless, Lewis has chosen a good time to intervene. Over the last decade, feminism has been seemingly emptied of any remaining, actual politics in order for it to be subsumed by brands marketing empowerment. In a post- Lean In climate, still very much dominated by “girlbosses” and “She-E-Os,” mainstream feminism can appear as though it has been completely divorced from its radical roots. Contemporary debates around gender roles, women’s labor, and sexual politics often seem to circle the same arguments feminist theorists had decades ago, but rarely acknowledge that this is the case. (Her next project is tackling some of these contemporary feminist archetypes in a book she's working on now, tentatively titled Feminism of Fools.)
Lewis’s call to abolish the family is also a call to re-energize and repoliticize feminism.
It would be wrong to credit Lewis with rediscovering figures like Firestone. But while these second-wave thinkers have not by any means been forgotten, their early work is more often cited than it is actively engaged with.
“At this point, the radical interventions of these feminist scholars and thinkers happened 30 to 40 years ago,” said Natasha Lennard, who is the author of Being Numerous: Essays on Non-Fascist Life, as well as a close friend of Lewis’s. “There’s been this static and hagiographic upholding of these ideas, but not a lot of pushing them forward, at least not in the public intellectual sphere.”
This kind of reverence is anathema to Lewis. When I asked her what contemporary feminists she admired, she named the queer feminist theorist Sara Ahmed, anti-work feminist Kathi Weeks, and the founding members of the Wages for Housework movement as a few examples, but said it’s “a mistake” to have feminist heroes. “You make them and in doing so you’re platforming someone who then is kind of cursed by that,” Lewis said. “They no longer keep learning and growing to the same degree,” potentially hampering new feminist thinking.
Haraway is an exception. Forgetting herself, Lewis will sometimes refer to Haraway as her “idol.”
Lewis’s call to abolish the family is also a call to re-energize and repoliticize feminism.
Even so, Haraway doesn’t get a free pass. Though Lewis builds on the theory found in Cyborg Manifesto and other early Haraway texts, she has critiqued some of the scholar’s more recent argumentation. In 2017, Lewis penned an essay for Viewpoint Magazine arguing that Haraway appeared to betray her own principles in her latest book, Staying With the Trouble. In Cyborg Manifesto, Haraway envisions a utopian post-gender future created by every member of the human species; but in Staying With the Trouble, Haraway calls for a dramatic reduction of the population in order to reduce humanity’s effects on the climate—a cynical turn toward misanthropy, Lewis wrote.
To Lewis’s surprise, she received an email from Haraway herself not long after the piece went up, inviting her into conversation with several other big-name feminists who were cc’ed. Haraway told Lewis that she had no choice but to “contend” with what Lewis had written: a well-argued piece of criticism. (Haraway told me she wasn’t available for interview due to travel.)
Lewis is bashful about this, but Haraway has made it clear that she sees Lewis as continuing the legacy of her work, even as she challenges it. Much of Lewis’s writing is fundamentally Harawayan in the sense that while at times very dense, it is filled with imagination and metaphor.
“Surrogates to the front!” Lewis exclaims toward the end of her book. “By surrogates I mean those comradely gestators, midwives, and other sundry interveners in the more slippery moments of social reproduction: repairing boats; swimming across borders; blockading lake-threatening pipelines; carrying; miscarrying.”
Afew hours after our breakfast, Lewis invited me to see Queen & Slim with her, Osterweil, and their friend Zach at a theater near the University of Pennsylvania's campus. The film—a drama about a young Black couple on the run after fatally shooting a police officer in self-defense—is not, on its face, about the nuclear family. But after spending just one afternoon with Lewis, I couldn’t help but think of it that way.
Slim is preoccupied by his “legacy,” which he initially sees as something that can exist only through a biological lineage. But at the end of the film, having made the choice to abandon his family to start a new life with Queen, he tells her that she’s his legacy.
Lewis said this happens all the time, this experience of watching something and noticing family abolitionist subtext. It’s probably even happened watching “some superhero movie,” she joked.
“Vicky always digs me in the ribs when we’re watching something that has to do with non-nuclear kinship,” Lewis told me the next day at a ramen restaurant near the office of her therapist, whom she had met with before lunch. “I already know when she’s going to do it. She’s like, ‘Uh?! Uh?!’”
Another place Lewis has found family abolitionist themes is in Ari Aster’s horror films, Hereditary and Midsommar, which she wrote about in August for Commune. The essay is Lewis at her best, weaving together the sharp analysis that caught Verso's eye with her idiosyncratic humor and wit. But it is also a somber look at the nuclear household of her childhood, of which we only get a glimpse in Full Surrogacy Now: Though Lewis may have come to her theories about family abolition and surrogacy intellectually, her own family upbringing has played a role that is difficult to ignore.
In the piece, Lewis tells us that her father taught her and her brother to treat their mother with contempt. When her parents separated, they literally divided the house in half, sealing off doorways and even creating a second kitchen, sectioned off from the original by an improvised partition.
“In other words, I know the family not to be a benign ‘default' situation,’” Lewis writes. “I’ve always known.”
In the wake of her mother’s death, she’d been contending with these family tensions once again. Lewis’s dad was blaming her for one of her mother’s long-ago suicide attempts, and sending nasty messages to her and her brother on Facebook and through email.
But even absent her father’s interventions, growing up, Lewis’s relationship with her mother wasn’t of the “mysterious variety of love” sort. This made grieving her death difficult, especially when so many people seemed to consider the loss of one’s mother—one’s “closest bio-relative,” as Lewis had put it in her November lecture—to be the greatest loss one can suffer.
“People have been saying to me, ‘Love yourself in the days ahead like she loved you,’” Lewis said. “And I’m like, ‘Oh my god, that’s a terrible idea!’ I need to do a lot better than that and so do all my friends.”
On the last day we spent together, I visited Lewis at her home. Originally, she was going to take me on a short walking tour of her neighborhood, but it was raining and gloomy outside, so we settled into two armchairs in her living room. She made us green tea, pouring mine into a mug that read “I’ve got 99 problems and white heteronormative patriarchy is basically all of them.” To my delight, her cat, a small tabby named Robespierre—after the French revolutionary—jumped onto my lap.
Lewis described her slice of West Philadelphia as a “village”: It includes Gold Standard, the quaint cafe where we first met, a tattoo parlor, a “social-justicey” yoga studio, a community garden, a “punk” hair salon, and an antique shop where Lewis and Osterweil had a $50 voucher, a wedding gift they still hadn’t used more than a year after they married. Days earlier, hunting for a seat at Gold Standard, we spotted someone leaving who turned out to be a friend of Lewis: They told her that they planned to sign up for the Brooklyn Institute class she is teaching this month at the anarchist bookstore Wooden Shoe Books.
Shortly after we found seats facing the window, we waved to Osterweil, who was smoking a cigarette as she crossed the street.
"I know the family not to be a benign ‘default' situation. I’ve always known.”
Sitting beside me in her apartment, Lewis showed me a scrapbook her mother had made, filled with photos of her playing with buckets of water and grinning at the beach—a reminder of her own arguments in Full Surrogacy Now that we should, figuratively, return to the “wateriness” in which we were gestated. It is at this time, Lewis says, when we are suspended in amniotic fluid, that the boundaries of our physical selves are in flux. To acknowledge that this is also true in life—that we are all inextricably connected to each other, biological family or not—would create the conditions for “radical kinship.”
She also showed me one of the zines she and Osterweil gave to guests at their wedding, which include speeches from friends and promises to each other. The latter could not properly be called “vows,” because they are in fact disavowals: of the institution of marriage, the biological family, and the dysfunction that both can breed. (They had a more traditional ceremony in Boston, at the request of Osterweil’s mother.)
To spend any amount of time with Lewis is to feel that the world she imagines is nearby. Whether we realize it or not, many of us are already familiar with her arguments for abolishing the family. When we talk about the prevalence of domestic violence and child abuse—when some of us find ourselves inside family units that perpetrate these crimes—we acknowledge that, in horror movie parlance, the violence is coming from inside the family.
We may not call it “family abolition” or “full surrogacy,” but many people have begun to erect the caregiving communes Lewis wants to see realized. Queer people build “chosen families,” as do other marginalized groups who depend on each other for their survival. And even within traditional nuclear households, parents might find themselves saying that it “takes a village” to raise children—an acknowledgement that it’s not a job one can do on their own.
In many ways, Lewis shows us, the family has already been abolished. At the same time, the “open-source, fully collaborative gestation” she imagines remains on a distant horizon. Riffing on a famous quote from the philosopher Fredric Jameson, Lewis considers that “if it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, it is perhaps easier still to imagine the end of capitalism than the end of the family.”
Nonetheless, Lewis sees glimmers of this future everywhere. When she is surrounded by her partner and her friends, she sees that she is “mothered by many.” They are not her biological relatives, but they are each other’s kin in an even truer sense: They have chosen to care for each other without the dictates of the nuclear family structure. In Lewis’ feminist utopia, family has not vanished; it has become more wild, more abundant, and less constrained.
Just a few days after her mother died, Lewis confused a woman crossing the street for her. “It provoked, in the moment, a torrent of intense tears,” Lewis wrote on Twitter. “But now I’m thinking about it and realizing she hasn’t just evaporated. She’ll always be around even after she stops haunting (e.g.) pedestrian crossings in Philadelphia.”
Mothers, of course, are everywhere.
Shorter and longer durations of sleep are associated with an increased twelve-month prevalence of psychiatric and substance use disorders
Shorter and longer durations of sleep are associated with an increased twelve-month prevalence of psychiatric and substance use disorders: Findings from a nationally representative survey of US adults (NESARC-III). Pierre A. Geoffroy et al. Journal of Psychiatric Research, February 21 2020. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpsychires.2020.02.018
Highlights
• This study present nationally representative data on the prevalence of mental disorders stratified by duration of sleep.
• A U-shaped association was observed between sleep duration and all psychiatric and substance use disorders.
• Highest risks, exceeding a 3-fold increase for some mental disorders, were observed for short sleepers, especially for the <5 h/night group compared with the 7 h/night reference group.
• These results suggest that adequate sleep duration may have general clinical benefits, calling for actions for primary prevention in public health settings.
Abstract: The lack of comprehensive data on the association between psychiatric and substance use disorders and habitual sleep duration represents a major health information gap. This study examines the 12-month prevalence of mental disorders stratified by duration of sleep. Data were drawn from face-to-face interviews conducted in the National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions III, a nationally representative survey of US adults (N = 36,309). There were 1893 (5.26%) participants who reported <5h of sleep/night; 2434(6.76%) 5 h/night; 7621(21.17%) 6 h/night; 9620(26.72%) 7 h/night; 11,186(31.07%) 8 h/night, and 3245(9.01%) ≥9 h/night. A U-shaped association was observed between sleep duration and all mental disorders. The prevalence of mental disorders was 55% for individuals with <5 h/night and 47.81% for ≥9 h/night, versus 28.24% for the 7 h/night (aOR = 1.90 and 1.39 respectively). The greatest odds ratios were for the <5 h/night group, with an increased risk above 3-fold for panic disorder (PD), post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), psychotic disorder, and suicide attempt; between 2 and 3 fold for major depressive disorder (MDD), bipolar disorder (BD), and generalized anxiety disorder (GAD); and between 1 and 2 fold for tobacco and drug use disorders, specific and social phobias. The ≥9 h/night group had an increased risk above 1 to 2-fold regarding tobacco and drug use disorders, MDD, BD, PD, social phobia, GAD, PTSD, psychotic disorder, and suicide attempt. U-shaped associations exist between sleep duration and mental disorders, calling for respect to recommendations for adequate sleep duration in routine clinical care as well as to actions for primary prevention in public health settings.
Keywords: SleepCircadian rhythmsPsychiatric disordersPsychiatryAddictions
Highlights
• This study present nationally representative data on the prevalence of mental disorders stratified by duration of sleep.
• A U-shaped association was observed between sleep duration and all psychiatric and substance use disorders.
• Highest risks, exceeding a 3-fold increase for some mental disorders, were observed for short sleepers, especially for the <5 h/night group compared with the 7 h/night reference group.
• These results suggest that adequate sleep duration may have general clinical benefits, calling for actions for primary prevention in public health settings.
Abstract: The lack of comprehensive data on the association between psychiatric and substance use disorders and habitual sleep duration represents a major health information gap. This study examines the 12-month prevalence of mental disorders stratified by duration of sleep. Data were drawn from face-to-face interviews conducted in the National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions III, a nationally representative survey of US adults (N = 36,309). There were 1893 (5.26%) participants who reported <5h of sleep/night; 2434(6.76%) 5 h/night; 7621(21.17%) 6 h/night; 9620(26.72%) 7 h/night; 11,186(31.07%) 8 h/night, and 3245(9.01%) ≥9 h/night. A U-shaped association was observed between sleep duration and all mental disorders. The prevalence of mental disorders was 55% for individuals with <5 h/night and 47.81% for ≥9 h/night, versus 28.24% for the 7 h/night (aOR = 1.90 and 1.39 respectively). The greatest odds ratios were for the <5 h/night group, with an increased risk above 3-fold for panic disorder (PD), post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), psychotic disorder, and suicide attempt; between 2 and 3 fold for major depressive disorder (MDD), bipolar disorder (BD), and generalized anxiety disorder (GAD); and between 1 and 2 fold for tobacco and drug use disorders, specific and social phobias. The ≥9 h/night group had an increased risk above 1 to 2-fold regarding tobacco and drug use disorders, MDD, BD, PD, social phobia, GAD, PTSD, psychotic disorder, and suicide attempt. U-shaped associations exist between sleep duration and mental disorders, calling for respect to recommendations for adequate sleep duration in routine clinical care as well as to actions for primary prevention in public health settings.
Keywords: SleepCircadian rhythmsPsychiatric disordersPsychiatryAddictions
Weaker copyrights encouraged the creation of follow-on science by a reduction in access costs, allowing scientists at less affluent institutions to use existing knowledge in new follow-on research
Effects of Copyrights on Science: Evidence from the WWII Book Republication Program. Barbara Biasi and Petra Moser. Feb 2020. https://www.dropbox.com/s/3go6y47fplwt6nf/BRP.pdf
Abstract: Copyrights, which establish intellectual property in music, science,and other creative goods, are intended to encourage creativity. Yet, copyrights also raise the cost of accessing existing work - potentially discouraging future innovation.This paper uses an exogenous shift towards weak copyrights(and low access costs) during WWII to examine the potentially adverse effects of copyrights on science. Using two alternative identification strategies, we show that weaker copyrights encouraged the creation of follow-on science, measured by citations.This change is driven by a reduction in access costs, allowing scientists at less affluent institutions to use existing knowledge in new follow-on research.
Previously: Effects of Copyrights on Science - Evidence from the US Book Republication Program
Barbara Biasi, Petra Moser. NBER Working Paper No. 24255, January 2018. https://www.nber.org/papers/w24255
Abstract: Copyrights for books, news, and other types of media are a critical mechanism to encourage creativity and innovation. Yet economic analyses continue to be rare, partly due to a lack of experimental variation in modern copyright laws. This paper exploits a change in copyright laws as a result of World War II to examine the effects of copyrights on science. In 1943, the US Book Republication Program (BRP) granted US publishers temporary licenses to republish the exact content of German-owned science books. Using new data on citations, we find that this program triggered a large increase in citations to German-owned science books. This increase was driven by a significant reduction in access costs: Each 10 percent decline in the price of BRP book was associated with a 43 percent increase in citations. To investigate the mechanism by which lower book prices influence science, we collect data on library holdings across the United States. We find that lower prices helped to distribute BRP books across US libraries, including less affluent institutions. Analyses of the locations of citing authors further indicate that citations increased most for locations that gained access to BRP books. Results are confirmed by two alternative measures of scientific output: new PhDs and US patents that use knowledge in BRP books.
Abstract: Copyrights, which establish intellectual property in music, science,and other creative goods, are intended to encourage creativity. Yet, copyrights also raise the cost of accessing existing work - potentially discouraging future innovation.This paper uses an exogenous shift towards weak copyrights(and low access costs) during WWII to examine the potentially adverse effects of copyrights on science. Using two alternative identification strategies, we show that weaker copyrights encouraged the creation of follow-on science, measured by citations.This change is driven by a reduction in access costs, allowing scientists at less affluent institutions to use existing knowledge in new follow-on research.
Previously: Effects of Copyrights on Science - Evidence from the US Book Republication Program
Barbara Biasi, Petra Moser. NBER Working Paper No. 24255, January 2018. https://www.nber.org/papers/w24255
Abstract: Copyrights for books, news, and other types of media are a critical mechanism to encourage creativity and innovation. Yet economic analyses continue to be rare, partly due to a lack of experimental variation in modern copyright laws. This paper exploits a change in copyright laws as a result of World War II to examine the effects of copyrights on science. In 1943, the US Book Republication Program (BRP) granted US publishers temporary licenses to republish the exact content of German-owned science books. Using new data on citations, we find that this program triggered a large increase in citations to German-owned science books. This increase was driven by a significant reduction in access costs: Each 10 percent decline in the price of BRP book was associated with a 43 percent increase in citations. To investigate the mechanism by which lower book prices influence science, we collect data on library holdings across the United States. We find that lower prices helped to distribute BRP books across US libraries, including less affluent institutions. Analyses of the locations of citing authors further indicate that citations increased most for locations that gained access to BRP books. Results are confirmed by two alternative measures of scientific output: new PhDs and US patents that use knowledge in BRP books.
Shifting the distribution of daily energy intake towards the breakfast meal may be a potential strategy to reduce overall energy intake and improve dietary intakes
Breakfast size is associated with daily energy intake and diet quality. Wenjie Wang et al. Nutrition, February 17 2020, 110764. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nut.2020.110764
Highlights
• Consuming more energy at breakfast relative to daily energy intake was associated with better dietary profiles and lower daily energy intake in a large nutrition survey
• Those consuming more than 25.5% of energy at breakfast had higher diet quality scores but similar daily energy intakes than breakfast skippers
• Shifting the distribution of daily energy intake towards the breakfast meal may be a potential strategy to improve dietary intakes and reduce overall energy intake
Abstract
Objective The aim of this study was to investigate the role of breakfast consumption and breakfast size on daily energy, nutrient intakes and diet quality.
Methods One-day 24-hour recall data from 2011-12 National Nutrition and Physical Activity Survey (n=9,341, adults ≥ 19 years) was analysed, where respondents were classified into breakfast consumers or skippers. Breakfast consumers were further classified into quartile of breakfast size (energy intake (EI) from breakfast x 100% / daily EI). Diet quality was assessed using the Healthy Eating Index for Australian Adults (HEIFA-2013). General linear modelling was undertaken to compare groups, adjusting for potential confounders.
Results Overall, 85.9% of adults consumed breakfast, contributing a mean of 19.9 ± SD10.9% of daily EI for consumers. Among breakfast consumers, obtaining a higher proportion of daily EI from breakfast was associated with lower daily intakes of energy, added sugars, saturated fat and alcohol (%E) and higher intakes of dietary fibre (%E) and most micronutrients (per 1,000 kJ) and better HEIFA-2013 scores (Ptrend<0.0001). Additionally, those in the highest quartile of breakfast size (>25.5% EI) had higher diet quality scores (P <0.001) but similar daily EI (P =0.751) compared with breakfast skippers.
Conclusions These findings indicate that obtaining a higher proportion of daily EI from breakfast may result in more favourable dietary profiles and lower daily EI. Further research is needed to confirm this.
Keywords: BreakfastMeal sizeEnergy intakeDiet qualityAdultsNutrition survey
Highlights
• Consuming more energy at breakfast relative to daily energy intake was associated with better dietary profiles and lower daily energy intake in a large nutrition survey
• Those consuming more than 25.5% of energy at breakfast had higher diet quality scores but similar daily energy intakes than breakfast skippers
• Shifting the distribution of daily energy intake towards the breakfast meal may be a potential strategy to improve dietary intakes and reduce overall energy intake
Abstract
Objective The aim of this study was to investigate the role of breakfast consumption and breakfast size on daily energy, nutrient intakes and diet quality.
Methods One-day 24-hour recall data from 2011-12 National Nutrition and Physical Activity Survey (n=9,341, adults ≥ 19 years) was analysed, where respondents were classified into breakfast consumers or skippers. Breakfast consumers were further classified into quartile of breakfast size (energy intake (EI) from breakfast x 100% / daily EI). Diet quality was assessed using the Healthy Eating Index for Australian Adults (HEIFA-2013). General linear modelling was undertaken to compare groups, adjusting for potential confounders.
Results Overall, 85.9% of adults consumed breakfast, contributing a mean of 19.9 ± SD10.9% of daily EI for consumers. Among breakfast consumers, obtaining a higher proportion of daily EI from breakfast was associated with lower daily intakes of energy, added sugars, saturated fat and alcohol (%E) and higher intakes of dietary fibre (%E) and most micronutrients (per 1,000 kJ) and better HEIFA-2013 scores (Ptrend<0.0001). Additionally, those in the highest quartile of breakfast size (>25.5% EI) had higher diet quality scores (P <0.001) but similar daily EI (P =0.751) compared with breakfast skippers.
Conclusions These findings indicate that obtaining a higher proportion of daily EI from breakfast may result in more favourable dietary profiles and lower daily EI. Further research is needed to confirm this.
Keywords: BreakfastMeal sizeEnergy intakeDiet qualityAdultsNutrition survey
Quiet rooms have a larger impact on patient satisfaction than medical quality; communication with nurses affects satisfaction far more than the hospital-level risk of dying, medical excellence or patient safety
Patients as Consumers in the Market for Medicine: The Halo Effect of Hospitality. Cristobal Young, Xinxiang Chen. Social Forces, soaa007, February 13 2020, https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soaa007
Abstract: Consumer-driven health care is often heralded as a new quality paradigm in medicine. However, patients-as-consumers face difficulties in judging the quality of their medical treatment. With a sample of 3,000 U.S. hospitals, we find that neither medical quality nor patient survival rates have much impact on patient satisfaction with their hospital. In contrast, patients are very sensitive to the “room and board” aspects of care that are highly visible. Quiet rooms have a larger impact on patient satisfaction than medical quality, and communication with nurses affects satisfaction far more than the hospital-level risk of dying. Hospitality experiences create a halo effect of patient goodwill, while medical excellence and patient safety do not. Moreover, when hospitals face greater competition from other hospitals, patient satisfaction is higher but medical quality is lower. Consumer-driven health care creates pressures for hospitals to be more like hotels. These findings lend broader insight into unintended consequences of marketization.
Abstract: Consumer-driven health care is often heralded as a new quality paradigm in medicine. However, patients-as-consumers face difficulties in judging the quality of their medical treatment. With a sample of 3,000 U.S. hospitals, we find that neither medical quality nor patient survival rates have much impact on patient satisfaction with their hospital. In contrast, patients are very sensitive to the “room and board” aspects of care that are highly visible. Quiet rooms have a larger impact on patient satisfaction than medical quality, and communication with nurses affects satisfaction far more than the hospital-level risk of dying. Hospitality experiences create a halo effect of patient goodwill, while medical excellence and patient safety do not. Moreover, when hospitals face greater competition from other hospitals, patient satisfaction is higher but medical quality is lower. Consumer-driven health care creates pressures for hospitals to be more like hotels. These findings lend broader insight into unintended consequences of marketization.
For many traits, males show greater variability than females; largest-ever mega-analysis of brain structure (international data spanning nine decades of life) shows greater male variability
Greater male than female variability in regional brain structure across the lifespan. Lara M Wierenga et al. bioRxiv, Feb 17 2020. https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.02.17.952010
Abstract: For many traits, males show greater variability than females, with possible implications for understanding sex differences in health and disease. Here, the ENIGMA (Enhancing Neuro Imaging Genetics through Meta-Analysis) Consortium presents the largest-ever mega-analysis of sex differences in variability of brain structure, based on international data spanning nine decades of life. Subcortical volumes, cortical surface area and cortical thickness were assessed in MRI data of 16,683 healthy individuals 1-90 years old (47% females). We observed patterns of greater male than female between-subject variance for all brain measures. This pattern was stable across the lifespan for 50% of the subcortical structures, 70% of the regional area measures, and nearly all regions for thickness. Our findings that these sex differences are present in childhood implicate early life genetic or gene-environment interaction mechanisms. The findings highlight the importance of individual differences within the sexes, that may underpin sex-specific vulnerability to disorders.
Abstract: For many traits, males show greater variability than females, with possible implications for understanding sex differences in health and disease. Here, the ENIGMA (Enhancing Neuro Imaging Genetics through Meta-Analysis) Consortium presents the largest-ever mega-analysis of sex differences in variability of brain structure, based on international data spanning nine decades of life. Subcortical volumes, cortical surface area and cortical thickness were assessed in MRI data of 16,683 healthy individuals 1-90 years old (47% females). We observed patterns of greater male than female between-subject variance for all brain measures. This pattern was stable across the lifespan for 50% of the subcortical structures, 70% of the regional area measures, and nearly all regions for thickness. Our findings that these sex differences are present in childhood implicate early life genetic or gene-environment interaction mechanisms. The findings highlight the importance of individual differences within the sexes, that may underpin sex-specific vulnerability to disorders.
Truth tellers reported more verifiable digital details & sources than liars; also provided more unverifiable detail than liars, which was not predicted & goes against the findings in previous studies
Fading lies: applying the verifiability approach after a period of delay. Louise Marie Jupe,Aldert Vrij,Sharon Leal & Galit Nahari. Psychology, Crime & Law, Sep 25 2019. https://doi.org/10.1080/1068316X.2019.1669594
ABSTRACT: We tested the utility of applying the Verifiability Approach (VA) to witness statements after a period of delay. The delay factor is important to consider because interviewees are often not interviewed directly after witnessing an event. A total of 64 liars partook in a mock crime and then lied about it during an interview, seven days later. Truth tellers (n = 78) partook in activities of their own choosing and told the truth about it during their interview, seven days later. All participants were split into three groups, which provided three different verbal instructions relating to the interviewer’s aim to assess the statements for the inclusion of verifiable information: no information protocol (IP) (n = 43), the standard-IP (n = 46) and an enhanced-IP (n = 53). In addition to the standard VA approach of analysing verifiable details, we further examined verifiable witness information and verifiable digital information and made a distinction between verifiable details and verifiable sources. We found that truth tellers reported more verifiable digital details and sources than liars.
KEYWORDS: Deception, verifiability approach, investigative interviews, delay
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We also found that truth tellers provided more unverifiable detail than liars, which was not predicted and goes against the findings in previous studies. We are unable to explain these different findings in our experiment compared to previous work. It could be related to the delay, but to test this an immediate condition needs to be included in the design. One of our initial aims was to see if the VA was still applicable in delay conditions. We did not include an immediate condition as we did not expect significant differences between the immediate and delay conditions. With hindsight, an immediate condition should have been included.
ABSTRACT: We tested the utility of applying the Verifiability Approach (VA) to witness statements after a period of delay. The delay factor is important to consider because interviewees are often not interviewed directly after witnessing an event. A total of 64 liars partook in a mock crime and then lied about it during an interview, seven days later. Truth tellers (n = 78) partook in activities of their own choosing and told the truth about it during their interview, seven days later. All participants were split into three groups, which provided three different verbal instructions relating to the interviewer’s aim to assess the statements for the inclusion of verifiable information: no information protocol (IP) (n = 43), the standard-IP (n = 46) and an enhanced-IP (n = 53). In addition to the standard VA approach of analysing verifiable details, we further examined verifiable witness information and verifiable digital information and made a distinction between verifiable details and verifiable sources. We found that truth tellers reported more verifiable digital details and sources than liars.
KEYWORDS: Deception, verifiability approach, investigative interviews, delay
---
We also found that truth tellers provided more unverifiable detail than liars, which was not predicted and goes against the findings in previous studies. We are unable to explain these different findings in our experiment compared to previous work. It could be related to the delay, but to test this an immediate condition needs to be included in the design. One of our initial aims was to see if the VA was still applicable in delay conditions. We did not include an immediate condition as we did not expect significant differences between the immediate and delay conditions. With hindsight, an immediate condition should have been included.
China & South Korea: Drivers had a greater intention to bully automated vehicles than to bully humans; Chinese (vs Korean), male (vs female), & younger (vs older) had a greater intention to drive aggressively
Ready to bully automated vehicles on public roads? Peng Liu, Yong Du, Lin Wang, Da Young Ju. Accident Analysis & Prevention, Volume 137, March 2020, 105457. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.aap.2020.105457
Highlights
• We designed an eleven-item bullying intention questionnaire.
• Participants in China and South Korea had a greater intention to bully AVs than to bully other human drivers.
• Chinese (vs. Korean) participants reported a greater intention to drive aggressively.
• Male (vs. female) participants reported a greater intention to drive aggressively.
• Younger (vs. older) participants reported a greater intention to drive aggressively.
Abstract: Automated vehicles (AVs), the wide adoption of which is expected to improve traffic safety significantly, are penetrating our roads. The AVs that are testing on public roads have been bullied by human road users. We are not sure whether the bullying incidents are isolated or will be common in the future. In a cross-national survey (N = 998 drivers in China and South Korea), we developed an eleven-item bullying intention questionnaire. We assumed and confirmed that, overall, participants had a greater intention to bully machine drivers than to bully other human drivers. Compared to the Korean participants, the Chinese participants reported a greater intention to drive aggressively. The correlations of their intention to bully AVs with their attitude toward AVs and with risk-benefit perception of AVs were weak. Male participants (vs. female participants) and younger participants (vs. older participants) reported a greater intention to drive aggressively. Drivers' aggressive behaviors toward AVs might be common in the future, which might increase traffic risk and hinder the implementation of this technology.
Keywords: automated vehiclesintention to bullymixed traffic flowbullying intention questionnaireaggressive driving
Highlights
• We designed an eleven-item bullying intention questionnaire.
• Participants in China and South Korea had a greater intention to bully AVs than to bully other human drivers.
• Chinese (vs. Korean) participants reported a greater intention to drive aggressively.
• Male (vs. female) participants reported a greater intention to drive aggressively.
• Younger (vs. older) participants reported a greater intention to drive aggressively.
Abstract: Automated vehicles (AVs), the wide adoption of which is expected to improve traffic safety significantly, are penetrating our roads. The AVs that are testing on public roads have been bullied by human road users. We are not sure whether the bullying incidents are isolated or will be common in the future. In a cross-national survey (N = 998 drivers in China and South Korea), we developed an eleven-item bullying intention questionnaire. We assumed and confirmed that, overall, participants had a greater intention to bully machine drivers than to bully other human drivers. Compared to the Korean participants, the Chinese participants reported a greater intention to drive aggressively. The correlations of their intention to bully AVs with their attitude toward AVs and with risk-benefit perception of AVs were weak. Male participants (vs. female participants) and younger participants (vs. older participants) reported a greater intention to drive aggressively. Drivers' aggressive behaviors toward AVs might be common in the future, which might increase traffic risk and hinder the implementation of this technology.
Keywords: automated vehiclesintention to bullymixed traffic flowbullying intention questionnaireaggressive driving
The unique contribution of blushing to the development of social anxiety disorder symptoms: results from a longitudinal study
The unique contribution of blushing to the development of social anxiety disorder symptoms: results from a longitudinal study. Milica Nikolić Mirjana Majdandžić Cristina Colonnesi Wieke de Vente Eline Möller Susan Bögels. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, February 20 2020 https://doi.org/10.1111/jcpp.13221
Abstract
Background Self‐conscious emotional reactivity and its physiological marker – blushing has been proposed to be an etiological mechanism of social anxiety disorder (SAD), but so far, untested in longitudinal designs. This study tested, for the first time, whether self‐conscious emotional reactivity (indexed as physiological blushing) contributes to the development of SAD symptoms over and above social behavioral inhibition (BI), which has been identified as the strongest predictor of SAD development in early childhood.
Methods One hundred fifteen children (45% boys) and their mothers and fathers participated at ages 2.5, 4.5, and 7.5 years. Social BI was observed at all time points in a stranger approach task, and physiological blushing (blood volume, blood pulse amplitude, and temperature increases) was measured during a public performance (singing) and watching back the performance at ages 4.5 and 7.5. Child early social anxiety was reported by both parents at 4.5 years, and SAD symptoms were diagnosed by clinicians and reported by both parents at 7.5 years.
Results Higher social BI at 2.5 and 4.5 years predicted greater social anxiety at 4.5 years, which, in turn, predicted SAD symptoms at 7.5 years. Blushing (temperature increase) at 4.5 years predicted SAD symptoms at 7.5 years over and above the influence of social BI and early social anxiety.
Conclusions That blushing uniquely contributes to the development of SAD symptoms over and above social BI suggests two pathways to childhood SAD: one that entails early high social BI and an early onset of social anxiety symptoms, and the other that consists of heightened self‐conscious emotional reactivity (i.e. blushing) in early childhood.
Abstract
Background Self‐conscious emotional reactivity and its physiological marker – blushing has been proposed to be an etiological mechanism of social anxiety disorder (SAD), but so far, untested in longitudinal designs. This study tested, for the first time, whether self‐conscious emotional reactivity (indexed as physiological blushing) contributes to the development of SAD symptoms over and above social behavioral inhibition (BI), which has been identified as the strongest predictor of SAD development in early childhood.
Methods One hundred fifteen children (45% boys) and their mothers and fathers participated at ages 2.5, 4.5, and 7.5 years. Social BI was observed at all time points in a stranger approach task, and physiological blushing (blood volume, blood pulse amplitude, and temperature increases) was measured during a public performance (singing) and watching back the performance at ages 4.5 and 7.5. Child early social anxiety was reported by both parents at 4.5 years, and SAD symptoms were diagnosed by clinicians and reported by both parents at 7.5 years.
Results Higher social BI at 2.5 and 4.5 years predicted greater social anxiety at 4.5 years, which, in turn, predicted SAD symptoms at 7.5 years. Blushing (temperature increase) at 4.5 years predicted SAD symptoms at 7.5 years over and above the influence of social BI and early social anxiety.
Conclusions That blushing uniquely contributes to the development of SAD symptoms over and above social BI suggests two pathways to childhood SAD: one that entails early high social BI and an early onset of social anxiety symptoms, and the other that consists of heightened self‐conscious emotional reactivity (i.e. blushing) in early childhood.
Large beauty premium: Attractiveness & trustworthiness perception increased with makeup wearing; male trustors transferred more money to women with makeup; effect is larger for less attractive females
Is the beauty premium accessible to all? An experimental analysis. Angela Cristiane Santos Póvoa et al. Journal of Economic Psychology, February 21 2020, 102252. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joep.2020.102252
Highlights
• There is a large beauty premium caused by makeup wearing.
• Both attractiveness and trustworthiness perception increased with makeup wearing.
• Makeup wearing increased transfers in the trust game.
• Male trustors transferred more money to women with makeup than female trustors did.
• The makeup effect is larger in magnitude for less attractive female trustees.
Abstract: We conducted a trust game experiment to investigate whether women are trusted more when they wear makeup than when they do not. Facial attractiveness, which was manipulated through the application of makeup by a professional makeup artist, was measured before and after makeovers. Trustors were shown a photograph of their female counterparts before they made decisions about money transfers to trustees. The results showed that wearing makeup increased perceived attractiveness, which in turn led trustors to make larger transfers to female trustees during the trust game. Additionally, we discovered a pure makeup premium that was mediated by gender. Specifically, female trustees with makeup received larger transfers than female trustees without makeup when the trustors were men, even after controlling for female trustees’ levels of attractiveness.
Keywords: trusttrust gamebeauty premiummakeupgender
Jel Code: C71 D003 C91
Highlights
• There is a large beauty premium caused by makeup wearing.
• Both attractiveness and trustworthiness perception increased with makeup wearing.
• Makeup wearing increased transfers in the trust game.
• Male trustors transferred more money to women with makeup than female trustors did.
• The makeup effect is larger in magnitude for less attractive female trustees.
Abstract: We conducted a trust game experiment to investigate whether women are trusted more when they wear makeup than when they do not. Facial attractiveness, which was manipulated through the application of makeup by a professional makeup artist, was measured before and after makeovers. Trustors were shown a photograph of their female counterparts before they made decisions about money transfers to trustees. The results showed that wearing makeup increased perceived attractiveness, which in turn led trustors to make larger transfers to female trustees during the trust game. Additionally, we discovered a pure makeup premium that was mediated by gender. Specifically, female trustees with makeup received larger transfers than female trustees without makeup when the trustors were men, even after controlling for female trustees’ levels of attractiveness.
Keywords: trusttrust gamebeauty premiummakeupgender
Jel Code: C71 D003 C91
Older adults more strongly endorsed a nonlimited account of energy, which perceived as more available for social activities; also saw higher negative cross-domain energy spillover after physical exertion
Cardini, B. B., & Freund, A. M. (2020). More or less energy with age? A motivational life-span perspective on subjective energy, exhaustion, and opportunity costs. Psychology and Aging, Feb 2020. https://doi.org/10.1037/pag0000445
Abstract: Two studies investigated subjective conceptualizations of energy for goal pursuit across adulthood. Study 1 (N = 276, 20–92 years of age) explored age-related differences in the (a) endorsement of a limited versus nonlimited account of energy for goal pursuit, (b) amount of energy available for physically, mentally, socially, and emotionally demanding activities, and (c) extent to which spending energy on a demanding activity inhibits or facilitates energy expenditure for subsequent activities, both within and across functional domains. Study 2 (N = 147, 18–86 years of age) experimentally induced energy loss through a 20-min physical exercise and examined age-related differences in the increase of subjective exhaustion and opportunity costs as a motivational cue for goal disengagement. With increasing age, adults more strongly endorsed a nonlimited account of energy and perceived having more energy available for personally relevant social activities. However, older adults also reported higher negative cross-domain energy spillover after physical exertion. Multilevel growth curve models further revealed that, compared with younger adults, older adults reported a steeper initial increase in exhaustion and opportunity costs during physical exercise, but converged with the younger age groups again at the close of the exercise session. The discussion centers around the importance of selectivity in older adulthood and motivational accounts of effort and exhaustion.
Abstract: Two studies investigated subjective conceptualizations of energy for goal pursuit across adulthood. Study 1 (N = 276, 20–92 years of age) explored age-related differences in the (a) endorsement of a limited versus nonlimited account of energy for goal pursuit, (b) amount of energy available for physically, mentally, socially, and emotionally demanding activities, and (c) extent to which spending energy on a demanding activity inhibits or facilitates energy expenditure for subsequent activities, both within and across functional domains. Study 2 (N = 147, 18–86 years of age) experimentally induced energy loss through a 20-min physical exercise and examined age-related differences in the increase of subjective exhaustion and opportunity costs as a motivational cue for goal disengagement. With increasing age, adults more strongly endorsed a nonlimited account of energy and perceived having more energy available for personally relevant social activities. However, older adults also reported higher negative cross-domain energy spillover after physical exertion. Multilevel growth curve models further revealed that, compared with younger adults, older adults reported a steeper initial increase in exhaustion and opportunity costs during physical exercise, but converged with the younger age groups again at the close of the exercise session. The discussion centers around the importance of selectivity in older adulthood and motivational accounts of effort and exhaustion.
Athletic scholarships are negatively associated with intrinsic motivation for sports, even decades later: Evidence for long-term undermining
Moller, A. C., & Sheldon, K. M. (2020). Athletic scholarships are negatively associated with intrinsic motivation for sports, even decades later: Evidence for long-term undermining. Motivation Science, 6(1), 43–48, Feb 2020. https://doi.org/10.1037/mot0000133
Abstract: In the United States, many colleges offer some student athletes scholarships contingent on maintaining high-level performance at a particular sport. Consistent with the well-supported “undermining effect,” studies have demonstrated that such scholarships can reduce athletes’ intrinsic motivation for their sport during their college playing career. The present study examines what happens to former college athletes’ intrinsic motivation after college, even decades later. Three hundred forty-eight former Division I college athletes completed an online survey (67.5% men, Mage = 49.2, 76% formerly on scholarship). Even after controlling for time elapsed since college, scholarship (vs. no scholarship) status was positively related to felt external motivation during college, and negatively related to present-day enjoyment of the target sport. Our findings suggest that undermining effects may persist much longer than previously documented (i.e., for decades, as opposed to hours, weeks, or months).
Abstract: In the United States, many colleges offer some student athletes scholarships contingent on maintaining high-level performance at a particular sport. Consistent with the well-supported “undermining effect,” studies have demonstrated that such scholarships can reduce athletes’ intrinsic motivation for their sport during their college playing career. The present study examines what happens to former college athletes’ intrinsic motivation after college, even decades later. Three hundred forty-eight former Division I college athletes completed an online survey (67.5% men, Mage = 49.2, 76% formerly on scholarship). Even after controlling for time elapsed since college, scholarship (vs. no scholarship) status was positively related to felt external motivation during college, and negatively related to present-day enjoyment of the target sport. Our findings suggest that undermining effects may persist much longer than previously documented (i.e., for decades, as opposed to hours, weeks, or months).
Friday, February 21, 2020
Can artificial intelligence, in particular, machine learning algorithms, replace the idea of simple rules, such as first possession and voluntary exchange in free markets, as a foundation for public policy?
Simple Rules for a Complex World with Artificial Intelligence. Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde. , February 21, 2020. https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/Simple_Rules_AI.pdf
Abstract: Can artificial intelligence, in particular, machine learning algorithms, replace the idea of simple rules, such as first possession and voluntary exchange in free markets, as a foundation for public policy? This paper argues that the preponderance of the evidence sides with the interpretation that while artificial intelligence will help public policy along with several important aspects, simple rules will remain the fundamental guideline for the design of institutions and legal environments. “Digital socialism” might be a hipster thing to talk about in Williamsburg or Shoreditch, but is as much of a chimera as “analog socialism.”
Keywords: Artificial intelligence, machine learning, economics, law, rule of law.
JEL codes: D85, H10, H30.
5 ML and central planning
Over the last few years, a few observers have made the bold prediction that, thanks to AI,
central planning is about to return (Saros, 2014, Wang and Li, 2017, Phillips and Rozworski,
2019, and Morozov, 2019). Some of these observers are rather prominent. For example, Jack
Ma, founder of Alibaba, stated in November 2016:
Over the past 100 years, we have come to believe that the market economy is
the best system, but in my opinion, there will be a significant change in the next
three decades, and the planned economy will become increasingly big. Why?
Because with access to all kinds of data, we may be able to find the invisible
hand of the market.
The planned economy I am talking about is not the same as the one used by
the Soviet Union or at the beginning of the founding of the People’s Republic of
China. The biggest difference between the market economy and planned economy
is that the former has the invisible hand of market forces. In the era of big data,
the abilities of human beings in obtaining and processing data are greater than
you can imagine.
With the help of artificial intelligence or multiple intelligence, our perception of
the world will be elevated to a new level. As such, big data will make the market
smarter and make it possible to plan and predict market forces so as to allow us
to finally achieve a planned economy.19
These proposals forget the final lesson of the socialist calculation debate, which came from Hayek (1945). The objections to central planning are not that solving the associated
optimization problem is extremely complex, which it is and increasingly so in an economy
with a maddening explosion of products, or that we need to gather the data and process it
sufficiently fast. If that were the case, AI and ML could perhaps solve the problem, if not
now, then in a few more iterations of Moore’s Law. The objections to central planning are that the information one needs to undertake is dispersed and, in the absence of a market
system, agents will never have the incentives to reveal it or even to create new information
through the entrepreneurial and innovative activity. As Steve Jobs put it: “A lot of times,
people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”20
A simple, real-life application of central planning illustrates the point. Every year, the
department of economics at the University of Pennsylvania faces the challenge of setting up
a teaching matrix for the next academic year.21 Each member of the faculty submits her
preferences in terms of courses to be taught, day of week, time of day, etc. Given the teaching
needs and submitted requests, the computational burden of finding the optimal allocation
is quite manageable. We have around 32 faculty members and, once you consider that the
average member of the theory group will never request to teach econometrics and vice versa,
the permutations to consider are limited. A few hours in front of Excel deliver the answer:
it seems that the central teaching planner at Penn Economics can do her job.
The real challenge is that, when I submit my teaching requests, I do not have an incentive
to reveal the truth about my preferences or to think too hard about developing a new course
that students might enjoy. I might not mind too much teaching a large undergraduate
session on a brand-new hot topic and, if I am a good instructor, the students will be better
off. However, I will not be compensated for the extra effort, even if it is not high, and I will
have an incentive to request a small section for advanced undergrads on an old-fashioned
topic. This request is not optimal: if the Dean could, for instance, pay me an extra stipend,
I would teach the large, innovative section, the students would be happier, and I would be
wealthier.22
An obvious solution would be, then, not to submit a teaching request, but a schedule of
teaching requests and a supply curve to do so, i.e., I will teach “the economics of big data”
at 9.00 am on Mondays and Wednesdays at price x or “advanced monetary theory” at 1.00
pm on Tuesdays and Wednesdays at price 0.4x. The central teaching planner will use the
supply curves to clear the teaching market and assign a faculty member to each course. This
new scheme would increase the computational challenge of setting up the teaching matrix
by one order of magnitude, but I can still write a short Julia program that will deliver an answer in a few minutes.
The drawback is that such a system of teaching requests and supply curves would open
the door to all sorts of strategic behavior: I will consider, when I submit my supply curve,
what I know about my colleagues’ tastes regarding teaching large, innovative courses. If I
believe they genuinely dislike doing so, I will communicate a higher supply curve to teach
such courses in order to clear the market at a higher price and increase my revenue. The
outcome of the teaching matrix will not be efficient because I am not telling the truth, but
playing strategically.
We can push the argument further. Knowing that the department will assign duties
using a teaching request and a supply curve, I can manipulate from the day I am hired how
I behave in front of my colleagues and the teaching requests and supply curves I submit. In
such a way, I can introduce noise in their signal about my teaching preferences and exploit
their incorrect inferences about my type when I submit my teaching requests and supply
curve in the future. My colleagues would know that and act accordingly, changing their
supply curve to reflect that they understand I tried to manipulate them. But I would also
know my colleagues know that and I will respond appropriately, and so on and so forth for
one iteration after another. Those who do not believe the faculty would behave in such a
way have not had experience managing academic departments.23
There is an additional problem. Once I am assigned a course, how does Penn ensure
I teach it at the “optimal” quality level? Note that “optimal” cannot mean the highest
possible quality. If I were to prepare every lecture that I give as a job market talk at
my dream department, the current students would love it, but I would not have time to
undertake research, and my future students would get worse lectures, since my knowledge of
the field would depreciate as I fall behind the frontier.
Even forgetting about that intertemporal aspect, how do we trade off one extra minute of
research (which increases Penn’s visibility and reputation) with one extra minute of teaching
preparation?24 And how do we address heterogeneity in the comparative ability between
research and teaching among faculty members when both efforts into each activity are, to a
large extent, unobservable?
Finally, we face the friction that I can carry my research with me to my next job (i.e., the
publications in my C.V.) much more easily than my teaching evaluations (i.e., I can always
“lose” the terrible teaching evaluation I got 15 years ago and nobody will be the wiser; after
all, most recruiting committees only ask for the most recent evaluations). Also, once I get
over some threshold of minimum quality in the teaching evaluations, nobody will pay much
attention to an extra half point. Thus, I have an incentive to teach a course that is below
the socially-optimal quality.
ML will never fix the problem of how to determine the teaching matrix at Penn Economics and to induce the “optimal” quality of the course. The problem was never about computing an optimal solution to teaching assignments given some data. The problem is, and will always be, determining the preferences, abilities, and effort of the faculty in a world where everyone has an incentive to misrepresent those preferences, abilities, and effort.
The only reliable method we have found to aggregate those preferences, abilities, and efforts is the market because it aligns, through the price system, incentives with information revelation. The method is not perfect, and the outcomes that come from it are often unsatisfactory. Nevertheless, like democracy, all the other alternatives, including “digital socialism,” are worse.25
Abstract: Can artificial intelligence, in particular, machine learning algorithms, replace the idea of simple rules, such as first possession and voluntary exchange in free markets, as a foundation for public policy? This paper argues that the preponderance of the evidence sides with the interpretation that while artificial intelligence will help public policy along with several important aspects, simple rules will remain the fundamental guideline for the design of institutions and legal environments. “Digital socialism” might be a hipster thing to talk about in Williamsburg or Shoreditch, but is as much of a chimera as “analog socialism.”
Keywords: Artificial intelligence, machine learning, economics, law, rule of law.
JEL codes: D85, H10, H30.
5 ML and central planning
Over the last few years, a few observers have made the bold prediction that, thanks to AI,
central planning is about to return (Saros, 2014, Wang and Li, 2017, Phillips and Rozworski,
2019, and Morozov, 2019). Some of these observers are rather prominent. For example, Jack
Ma, founder of Alibaba, stated in November 2016:
Over the past 100 years, we have come to believe that the market economy is
the best system, but in my opinion, there will be a significant change in the next
three decades, and the planned economy will become increasingly big. Why?
Because with access to all kinds of data, we may be able to find the invisible
hand of the market.
The planned economy I am talking about is not the same as the one used by
the Soviet Union or at the beginning of the founding of the People’s Republic of
China. The biggest difference between the market economy and planned economy
is that the former has the invisible hand of market forces. In the era of big data,
the abilities of human beings in obtaining and processing data are greater than
you can imagine.
With the help of artificial intelligence or multiple intelligence, our perception of
the world will be elevated to a new level. As such, big data will make the market
smarter and make it possible to plan and predict market forces so as to allow us
to finally achieve a planned economy.19
These proposals forget the final lesson of the socialist calculation debate, which came from Hayek (1945). The objections to central planning are not that solving the associated
optimization problem is extremely complex, which it is and increasingly so in an economy
with a maddening explosion of products, or that we need to gather the data and process it
sufficiently fast. If that were the case, AI and ML could perhaps solve the problem, if not
now, then in a few more iterations of Moore’s Law. The objections to central planning are that the information one needs to undertake is dispersed and, in the absence of a market
system, agents will never have the incentives to reveal it or even to create new information
through the entrepreneurial and innovative activity. As Steve Jobs put it: “A lot of times,
people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”20
A simple, real-life application of central planning illustrates the point. Every year, the
department of economics at the University of Pennsylvania faces the challenge of setting up
a teaching matrix for the next academic year.21 Each member of the faculty submits her
preferences in terms of courses to be taught, day of week, time of day, etc. Given the teaching
needs and submitted requests, the computational burden of finding the optimal allocation
is quite manageable. We have around 32 faculty members and, once you consider that the
average member of the theory group will never request to teach econometrics and vice versa,
the permutations to consider are limited. A few hours in front of Excel deliver the answer:
it seems that the central teaching planner at Penn Economics can do her job.
The real challenge is that, when I submit my teaching requests, I do not have an incentive
to reveal the truth about my preferences or to think too hard about developing a new course
that students might enjoy. I might not mind too much teaching a large undergraduate
session on a brand-new hot topic and, if I am a good instructor, the students will be better
off. However, I will not be compensated for the extra effort, even if it is not high, and I will
have an incentive to request a small section for advanced undergrads on an old-fashioned
topic. This request is not optimal: if the Dean could, for instance, pay me an extra stipend,
I would teach the large, innovative section, the students would be happier, and I would be
wealthier.22
An obvious solution would be, then, not to submit a teaching request, but a schedule of
teaching requests and a supply curve to do so, i.e., I will teach “the economics of big data”
at 9.00 am on Mondays and Wednesdays at price x or “advanced monetary theory” at 1.00
pm on Tuesdays and Wednesdays at price 0.4x. The central teaching planner will use the
supply curves to clear the teaching market and assign a faculty member to each course. This
new scheme would increase the computational challenge of setting up the teaching matrix
by one order of magnitude, but I can still write a short Julia program that will deliver an answer in a few minutes.
The drawback is that such a system of teaching requests and supply curves would open
the door to all sorts of strategic behavior: I will consider, when I submit my supply curve,
what I know about my colleagues’ tastes regarding teaching large, innovative courses. If I
believe they genuinely dislike doing so, I will communicate a higher supply curve to teach
such courses in order to clear the market at a higher price and increase my revenue. The
outcome of the teaching matrix will not be efficient because I am not telling the truth, but
playing strategically.
We can push the argument further. Knowing that the department will assign duties
using a teaching request and a supply curve, I can manipulate from the day I am hired how
I behave in front of my colleagues and the teaching requests and supply curves I submit. In
such a way, I can introduce noise in their signal about my teaching preferences and exploit
their incorrect inferences about my type when I submit my teaching requests and supply
curve in the future. My colleagues would know that and act accordingly, changing their
supply curve to reflect that they understand I tried to manipulate them. But I would also
know my colleagues know that and I will respond appropriately, and so on and so forth for
one iteration after another. Those who do not believe the faculty would behave in such a
way have not had experience managing academic departments.23
There is an additional problem. Once I am assigned a course, how does Penn ensure
I teach it at the “optimal” quality level? Note that “optimal” cannot mean the highest
possible quality. If I were to prepare every lecture that I give as a job market talk at
my dream department, the current students would love it, but I would not have time to
undertake research, and my future students would get worse lectures, since my knowledge of
the field would depreciate as I fall behind the frontier.
Even forgetting about that intertemporal aspect, how do we trade off one extra minute of
research (which increases Penn’s visibility and reputation) with one extra minute of teaching
preparation?24 And how do we address heterogeneity in the comparative ability between
research and teaching among faculty members when both efforts into each activity are, to a
large extent, unobservable?
Finally, we face the friction that I can carry my research with me to my next job (i.e., the
publications in my C.V.) much more easily than my teaching evaluations (i.e., I can always
“lose” the terrible teaching evaluation I got 15 years ago and nobody will be the wiser; after
all, most recruiting committees only ask for the most recent evaluations). Also, once I get
over some threshold of minimum quality in the teaching evaluations, nobody will pay much
attention to an extra half point. Thus, I have an incentive to teach a course that is below
the socially-optimal quality.
ML will never fix the problem of how to determine the teaching matrix at Penn Economics and to induce the “optimal” quality of the course. The problem was never about computing an optimal solution to teaching assignments given some data. The problem is, and will always be, determining the preferences, abilities, and effort of the faculty in a world where everyone has an incentive to misrepresent those preferences, abilities, and effort.
The only reliable method we have found to aggregate those preferences, abilities, and efforts is the market because it aligns, through the price system, incentives with information revelation. The method is not perfect, and the outcomes that come from it are often unsatisfactory. Nevertheless, like democracy, all the other alternatives, including “digital socialism,” are worse.25
The Neurology of Acquired Pedophilia: Twenty-two cases fit our inclusion criteria, all but one were men, and in only one case the injury was localized to the left hemisphere; 18 were hypersexualized
The Neurology of Acquired Pedophilia. Pedro Maranhão Gomes Lopes et al. The Neural Basis of Cognition, Feb 20 2020. https://doi.org/10.1080/13554794.2020.1727929
ABSTRACT: The clinicoanatomic cases of acquired pedophilia that have been published in the medical and forensic literature up to 2019 are reviewed. Twenty-two cases fit our inclusion criteria. All but one were men, and in only one case the injury was localized to the left hemisphere. Hypersexuality was present in 18 cases. The damaged areas fell within the frontotemporoinsular cortices and related subcortical nuclei; however, the anterior hypothalamus was spared. Damage to parts of the right frontotemporoinsular lobes with sparing of the anterior hypothalamus seems to be critical for the emergence of acquired pedophilia.
KEYWORDS: Acquired pedophilia, acquired sociopathy, frontotemporoinsular cortices, medial forebrain bundle, hypersexuality, perifornical region
ABSTRACT: The clinicoanatomic cases of acquired pedophilia that have been published in the medical and forensic literature up to 2019 are reviewed. Twenty-two cases fit our inclusion criteria. All but one were men, and in only one case the injury was localized to the left hemisphere. Hypersexuality was present in 18 cases. The damaged areas fell within the frontotemporoinsular cortices and related subcortical nuclei; however, the anterior hypothalamus was spared. Damage to parts of the right frontotemporoinsular lobes with sparing of the anterior hypothalamus seems to be critical for the emergence of acquired pedophilia.
KEYWORDS: Acquired pedophilia, acquired sociopathy, frontotemporoinsular cortices, medial forebrain bundle, hypersexuality, perifornical region
Online sexually explicit material appeared to have a negligible role in individuals’ current sexual functioning and mental well-being
A lack of association between online pornography exposure, sexual functioning, and mental well-being. Ruth Chari et al. Sexual and Relationship Therapy, Feb 20 2020. https://doi.org/10.1080/14681994.2020.1727874
Abstract: To inform debate around potential influences of online pornography, we applied a contemporary media-effects model to examine the relationship between online sexually explicit material (oSEM) exposure and several psychosocial outcomes – including sexual satisfaction, body satisfaction, sexist attitudes, and mental well-being. Perceived realism of oSEM (the extent to which it is believed to be a realistic portrayal of sexual experience) was assessed as a potential mediator of exposure-outcome relationships. Furthermore, family communication about sex and gender were investigated as potential moderators of any indirect relationships (via perceived realism). Using a convenience sample of cisgender, heterosexual adults (N = 252) and a cross-sectional questionnaire design, we found no significant direct or indirect relationships between oSEM-use and the psychosocial outcomes in question; equivalence testing demonstrated that (for all outcomes other than body satisfaction) we could reject effect sizes (rs) > ±.20. Overall, findings do not favour a negative or positive relationship between oSEM and the psychosocial outcomes under examination – oSEM appeared to have a negligible role in individuals’ current sexual functioning and mental well-being.
Keywords: Pornography, sexuality, media effects, perceived realism, family communication, online
Abstract: To inform debate around potential influences of online pornography, we applied a contemporary media-effects model to examine the relationship between online sexually explicit material (oSEM) exposure and several psychosocial outcomes – including sexual satisfaction, body satisfaction, sexist attitudes, and mental well-being. Perceived realism of oSEM (the extent to which it is believed to be a realistic portrayal of sexual experience) was assessed as a potential mediator of exposure-outcome relationships. Furthermore, family communication about sex and gender were investigated as potential moderators of any indirect relationships (via perceived realism). Using a convenience sample of cisgender, heterosexual adults (N = 252) and a cross-sectional questionnaire design, we found no significant direct or indirect relationships between oSEM-use and the psychosocial outcomes in question; equivalence testing demonstrated that (for all outcomes other than body satisfaction) we could reject effect sizes (rs) > ±.20. Overall, findings do not favour a negative or positive relationship between oSEM and the psychosocial outcomes under examination – oSEM appeared to have a negligible role in individuals’ current sexual functioning and mental well-being.
Keywords: Pornography, sexuality, media effects, perceived realism, family communication, online
Randomly assigned confederates or participants to act extraverted or introverted; interaction partners showed more positive social behaviors with extraverted actors
Does acting extraverted evoke positive social feedback? Mariya Davydenko et al. Personality and Individual Differences, Volume 159, 1 June 2020, 109883. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2020.109883
Highlights
• Randomly assigned confederates or participants to act extraverted or introverted.
• Interaction partners showed more positive social behaviors with extraverted actors.
• Behaviors were rated by the participant, confederate, and an observer.
• Extraverted behavior has the potential to evoke positive social feedback in others.
Abstract: Personality traits describe average tendencies, yet momentary behaviors in trait domains vary widely. Notably, both dispositional introverts and extraverts experience greater positive affect when behaving in extraverted ways. We test a potential explanation: extraverted behavior may evoke more positive social feedback from others. In Study 1, participants who were randomly assigned to interact with confederates who acted extraverted (vs. introverted) displayed more positive verbal and nonverbal social behaviors during interactions. Behaviors were rated by the participant, confederate, and an observer (via video). Study 2 reversed roles; neutral confederates who interacted with participants who were randomly assigned to act extraverted (vs. introverted) displayed more positive social behaviors. This research extends previous findings by examining how enacted extraversion influences interaction dynamics.
Highlights
• Randomly assigned confederates or participants to act extraverted or introverted.
• Interaction partners showed more positive social behaviors with extraverted actors.
• Behaviors were rated by the participant, confederate, and an observer.
• Extraverted behavior has the potential to evoke positive social feedback in others.
Abstract: Personality traits describe average tendencies, yet momentary behaviors in trait domains vary widely. Notably, both dispositional introverts and extraverts experience greater positive affect when behaving in extraverted ways. We test a potential explanation: extraverted behavior may evoke more positive social feedback from others. In Study 1, participants who were randomly assigned to interact with confederates who acted extraverted (vs. introverted) displayed more positive verbal and nonverbal social behaviors during interactions. Behaviors were rated by the participant, confederate, and an observer (via video). Study 2 reversed roles; neutral confederates who interacted with participants who were randomly assigned to act extraverted (vs. introverted) displayed more positive social behaviors. This research extends previous findings by examining how enacted extraversion influences interaction dynamics.
Dark personality features were positively associated with competitive worldviews; sometimes had indirect associations with social dominance orientation through competitive worldviews, but not with right-wing authoritarianism
The darker angels of our nature: Do social worldviews mediate the associations that dark personality features have with ideological attitudes? Virgil Zeigler-Hill et al. Personality and Individual Differences, Volume 160, 1 July 2020, 109920. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2020.109920
Highlights
• Dark personality features were positively associated with competitive worldviews.
• Dark personality features sometimes had indirect associations with SDO through competitive worldviews.
• Dark personality features had, at best, weak associations with dangerous worldviews.
Abstract: The present studies examined the associations that narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, sadism, and spitefulness had with the competitive and dangerous social worldviews as well as the possibility that these worldviews may explain, at least in part, the associations that these dark personality features had with the ideological attitudes of social dominance orientation (SDO) and right-wing authoritarianism (RWA). Across three studies (N = 2,103), we found the dark personality features to be positively associated with the competitive social worldview in Studies 1 and 3 but these associations were much weaker in Study 2. Narcissism, psychopathy, and spitefulness had indirect associations with the dominance and anti-egalitarianism aspects of SDO through the competitive social worldview in Study 3 but not in Study 2. In contrast, the dark personality features had, at best, weak associations with the dangerous social worldview as well as divergent associations with aspects of RWA. More specifically, narcissism and spitefulness were positively associated with aspects of RWA but psychopathy was negatively associated with RWA. Discussion focuses on the role that social worldviews – especially perceptions of the world as being a highly competitive environment – may play in the connections that dark personality features have with various outcomes including ideological attitudes.
Highlights
• Dark personality features were positively associated with competitive worldviews.
• Dark personality features sometimes had indirect associations with SDO through competitive worldviews.
• Dark personality features had, at best, weak associations with dangerous worldviews.
Abstract: The present studies examined the associations that narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, sadism, and spitefulness had with the competitive and dangerous social worldviews as well as the possibility that these worldviews may explain, at least in part, the associations that these dark personality features had with the ideological attitudes of social dominance orientation (SDO) and right-wing authoritarianism (RWA). Across three studies (N = 2,103), we found the dark personality features to be positively associated with the competitive social worldview in Studies 1 and 3 but these associations were much weaker in Study 2. Narcissism, psychopathy, and spitefulness had indirect associations with the dominance and anti-egalitarianism aspects of SDO through the competitive social worldview in Study 3 but not in Study 2. In contrast, the dark personality features had, at best, weak associations with the dangerous social worldview as well as divergent associations with aspects of RWA. More specifically, narcissism and spitefulness were positively associated with aspects of RWA but psychopathy was negatively associated with RWA. Discussion focuses on the role that social worldviews – especially perceptions of the world as being a highly competitive environment – may play in the connections that dark personality features have with various outcomes including ideological attitudes.
Thursday, February 20, 2020
We got psychological defenses against manipulation, also in politics; demagogues and disinformation can be explained as tools for achieving coordination of those predisposed for conflict rather than manipulated into conflict
The Evolutionary Psychology of Mass Mobilization: How Disinformation and Demagogues Coordinate Rather Than Manipulate. Michael Bang Petersen. Current Opinion in Psychology, February 20 2020. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2020.02.003
Highlights
• Violent mobilization is often attributed to manipulation from, for example, demagogues.
• The human mind contains psychological defenses against manipulation, also in politics.
• Mass mobilization requires that the attention of group members is coordinated.
• Demagogues and disinformation can be explained as tools for achieving coordination.
• Mobilized individuals are predisposed for conflict rather than manipulated into conflict.
Abstract: Large-scale mobilization is often accompanied by the emergence of demagogic leaders and the circulation of unverified rumors, especially if the mobilization happens in support of violent or disruptive projects. In those circumstances, researchers and commentators frequently explain the mobilization as a result of mass manipulation. Against this view, evolutionary psychologists have provided evidence that human psychology contains mechanisms for avoiding manipulation and new studies suggest that political manipulation attempts are, in general, ineffective. Instead, we can understand decisions to follow demagogic leaders and circulate fringe rumors as attempts to solve a social problem inherent to mobilization processes: The coordination problem. Essentially, these decisions reflect attempts to align the attention of individuals already disposed for conflict.
Highlights
• Violent mobilization is often attributed to manipulation from, for example, demagogues.
• The human mind contains psychological defenses against manipulation, also in politics.
• Mass mobilization requires that the attention of group members is coordinated.
• Demagogues and disinformation can be explained as tools for achieving coordination.
• Mobilized individuals are predisposed for conflict rather than manipulated into conflict.
Abstract: Large-scale mobilization is often accompanied by the emergence of demagogic leaders and the circulation of unverified rumors, especially if the mobilization happens in support of violent or disruptive projects. In those circumstances, researchers and commentators frequently explain the mobilization as a result of mass manipulation. Against this view, evolutionary psychologists have provided evidence that human psychology contains mechanisms for avoiding manipulation and new studies suggest that political manipulation attempts are, in general, ineffective. Instead, we can understand decisions to follow demagogic leaders and circulate fringe rumors as attempts to solve a social problem inherent to mobilization processes: The coordination problem. Essentially, these decisions reflect attempts to align the attention of individuals already disposed for conflict.
From 2012... Japanese herbivore men: Heterosexual men 20-34 who lack ambition, engage in feminine consumption practices, & shirk relationships with the opposite sex; instead of corporate careers, they prefer lower paying, less demanding jobs
The Rise of 草食系男子 (Soushokukei Danshi) Masculinity and Consumption in Contemporary Japan: A Historic and Discursive Analysis. Steven Chen. In book: Gender, Culture and Consumption. Cele Otnes, Linda Zayer (eds.). January 2012. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/307108482
Abstract: In Soushoku Danshi Sedai Heisei Danshi Zukan (Handbook of Man in the Heisei Period), Maki Fukasawa (2009) coins the term soushokukei danshi (“grass-eating type men” or “herbivore men”) to describe heterosexual Japanese men who lack ambition, engage in feminine consumption practices, and shirk relationships with the opposite sex. Typically young men between the ages of 20 and 34, soushokukei danshi are less status conscious than men from previous generations; rather than pursue corporate careers, they prefer lower paying, less demanding jobs. A key marker of soushokukei danshi is their feminized consumption practices, which include shopping, beautification practices, and fine dining. Rather than pursue relationships with women, they prefer being alone playing video games and surfing the Internet. As a result of their consumption practices, the popular media labels them “girly men” or “ladylike.” Soushokukei danshi are not social deviants, but rather an emergent form of Japanese masculinity. In Japan, aggressive masculinities embodied by the salaryman and nikushokukei danshi (“meat-eating type men” or “carnivore men”) represent masculine ideals, but a shift in masculine values is under way (Dasgupta, 2009). According to a 2009 study conducted by M1 F1 Soken, a marketing research firm, 60% of unmarried Japanese men between the ages of 20 and 34 identify themselves as soushokukei danshi. The finding that many Japanese men associate themselves with “feminized” masculinity is notable in a society that was once considered the most masculine in the world.
---
Soushokukei danshi consumption practices echo those of Western metrosexuals (Rinallo, 2007; Simpson, 2002; Tuncay, 2006; Tuncay & Otnes, 2008b). They are fashion conscious and sport ensembles that are considered feminine by Japanese society, such as tight pants with long flowing shirts. They are also concerned with their body and engage in beautification practices such as slimming treatments, day spas, facials, and eyebrow grooming practices (Miller, 2003). Other consumption practices include shopping, taking leisurely walks, and eating fine desserts. In everyday parlance, soushokukei danshi consumption is feminine because beautification and shopping are activities that are traditionally gendered female (Davis, 2003; Otnes & McGrath, 2001; Roberts, 1998).
Soushokukei danshi exhibit a weak career orientation. Many contemporary Japanese men reject traditional masculine ideals of elite education, high income, and physical stature (Roberson & Suzuki, 2003). Rather than pursuing upward social mobility through an intense work ethic, they prefer comfortable lifestyles, which allow time for hedonic pursuits. Aphorisms like “life is short” and “doing okay is okay” drive their life philosophies. But there is a trade-off. To maximize their leisure time, many soushokukei danshi select jobs with lower salaries.
Soushokukei danshi are heterosexual men, but are purportedly uninterested in relationships with the opposite sex (Fukasawa, 2009). However, soushokukei danshi’s inability to sustain long-term, sexual relationships is more likely a result of their low income than their purported lack of interest in sex. Spa!, a Japanese marketing firm, surveyed men between the ages of 25 and 39 who earned less than 2 million yen (roughly $24,000) a year, a benchmark for classifying the “working poor,” and found that 65% of men in this bracket are discontent with their sex lives, 19.3% have given up on sex, and 20% are still virgins. The video game company Konami finds that 20% of men surveyed expressed interest in dating a female video game character. There are now a variety of love simulation games, such as Love Plus, which allow players to date video game avatars.
Abstract: In Soushoku Danshi Sedai Heisei Danshi Zukan (Handbook of Man in the Heisei Period), Maki Fukasawa (2009) coins the term soushokukei danshi (“grass-eating type men” or “herbivore men”) to describe heterosexual Japanese men who lack ambition, engage in feminine consumption practices, and shirk relationships with the opposite sex. Typically young men between the ages of 20 and 34, soushokukei danshi are less status conscious than men from previous generations; rather than pursue corporate careers, they prefer lower paying, less demanding jobs. A key marker of soushokukei danshi is their feminized consumption practices, which include shopping, beautification practices, and fine dining. Rather than pursue relationships with women, they prefer being alone playing video games and surfing the Internet. As a result of their consumption practices, the popular media labels them “girly men” or “ladylike.” Soushokukei danshi are not social deviants, but rather an emergent form of Japanese masculinity. In Japan, aggressive masculinities embodied by the salaryman and nikushokukei danshi (“meat-eating type men” or “carnivore men”) represent masculine ideals, but a shift in masculine values is under way (Dasgupta, 2009). According to a 2009 study conducted by M1 F1 Soken, a marketing research firm, 60% of unmarried Japanese men between the ages of 20 and 34 identify themselves as soushokukei danshi. The finding that many Japanese men associate themselves with “feminized” masculinity is notable in a society that was once considered the most masculine in the world.
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Soushokukei danshi consumption practices echo those of Western metrosexuals (Rinallo, 2007; Simpson, 2002; Tuncay, 2006; Tuncay & Otnes, 2008b). They are fashion conscious and sport ensembles that are considered feminine by Japanese society, such as tight pants with long flowing shirts. They are also concerned with their body and engage in beautification practices such as slimming treatments, day spas, facials, and eyebrow grooming practices (Miller, 2003). Other consumption practices include shopping, taking leisurely walks, and eating fine desserts. In everyday parlance, soushokukei danshi consumption is feminine because beautification and shopping are activities that are traditionally gendered female (Davis, 2003; Otnes & McGrath, 2001; Roberts, 1998).
Soushokukei danshi exhibit a weak career orientation. Many contemporary Japanese men reject traditional masculine ideals of elite education, high income, and physical stature (Roberson & Suzuki, 2003). Rather than pursuing upward social mobility through an intense work ethic, they prefer comfortable lifestyles, which allow time for hedonic pursuits. Aphorisms like “life is short” and “doing okay is okay” drive their life philosophies. But there is a trade-off. To maximize their leisure time, many soushokukei danshi select jobs with lower salaries.
Soushokukei danshi are heterosexual men, but are purportedly uninterested in relationships with the opposite sex (Fukasawa, 2009). However, soushokukei danshi’s inability to sustain long-term, sexual relationships is more likely a result of their low income than their purported lack of interest in sex. Spa!, a Japanese marketing firm, surveyed men between the ages of 25 and 39 who earned less than 2 million yen (roughly $24,000) a year, a benchmark for classifying the “working poor,” and found that 65% of men in this bracket are discontent with their sex lives, 19.3% have given up on sex, and 20% are still virgins. The video game company Konami finds that 20% of men surveyed expressed interest in dating a female video game character. There are now a variety of love simulation games, such as Love Plus, which allow players to date video game avatars.
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