Vietnam is spending in education a fraction of what others spend and results are very good; the reason of this success, they told us, was: ‘because they wanted it’

Lant Pritchett in conversation with Ann Bernstein. The Centre for Development and Enterprise, Jun 2021. https://www.cde.org.za/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Lant-Pritchett-in-conversation-with-Ann-Bernstein.pdf

Ann Bernstein: From your knowledge of India and Indonesia, what are the core causes of their lack of educational progress? These are places with highly qualified civil servants and, at least in India’s case, a democratic government. How do you see this problem? How do we get out of this trap? 

Lant Pritchett: I’m head of this very large research project called RISE and we’re spending millions of dollars to find out the answer to that question. One of the countries where education improvements have been dramatic is Vietnam. At a tiny fraction of the spending in most countries – including South Africa – Vietnam is achieving OECD levels of learning. When we asked our Vietnam team why the country has produced this amazing success, they told us: ‘because they wanted it’.  On one level, that seems silly; on another level, it is the key. Unless, as a society, you agree on a set of achievable objectives and actually act in a way that reveals that you really want those objectives, you cannot achieve anything.

So, let me talk briefly about the two different experiences of India and Indonesia, because I think they both illustrate ways you can go wrong.

India never changed its mind about having a selection system rather than an education system. A selection system is where you put all children in a classroom, but provide a poor or indifferent environment for learning, and see what happens. The students that learn in that environment must be brilliant. As for those who do not learn, teachers will say they must be the type of children who cannot learn. India took that option because they expected that 2-3% of the population would be an educated elite, and that would be good enough. And so, they committed themselves to selection rather than education. Things will only change once they fundamentally change their ideas, which they are hopefully in the process of doing now.

Indonesia was different. They decided to provide a standardised product for all learners at a fairly low level, and they reached a decent level of learning where most kids learned some basics. In fact, they were superior to India. Many people think of India as doing better, but India does worse for the average person while also producing a smart elite whose members sometime win a Nobel Prize. Indonesia did far better at covering the basics for everyone as a way of building national unity around a common language. But they never really provoked themselves to go further. Now, they’re stuck at this low-level equilibrium of mediocrity, and they haven’t been able to budge past it in spite of making an important transition to democracy.

The fundamental issue is commitment. Do we have a clear vision of what we expect every child to know and do? Is it a reasonable set of commitments? Can we actually achieve it with the resources we have and the teaching force we have, and what we know how to do? And are we really committed to achieving it? Are we going to hold ourselves to account for achieving the reasonable and important objectives we’ve set? Once you get that right, there are some other things that need to happen, but those are minor details.

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Very sensible, progressive, well-intentioned, etc., but do we really know? We don't, the successes are not replicable. To me, there is no known "fundamental issue," "key," anything that will make success happen.

Ostensibly non-political objects and activities are becoming “partisan”; there is accordingly talk of a cultural divide between latte-drinking, Volvo-driving liberals & NASCAR-watching, truck-driving conservatives

Cued by Culture: Political Imagery and Partisan Evaluations. Dan Hiaeshutter-Rice, Fabian G. Neuner & Stuart Soroka. Political Behavior, Jun 26 2021. https://rd.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11109-021-09726-6

Abstract: There is a popular perception that politics is increasingly permeating the everyday lives of Americans. Ostensibly non-political objects and activities are becoming “partisan,” and there is accordingly talk of a cultural divide between Latte-drinking, Volvo-driving Liberals and NASCAR-watching, truck-driving Conservatives. This study examines the extent to which this perception is accurate. We first find that survey respondents have no trouble assigning partisan leaning to non-political activities and objects. We then explore whether voters use such non-political objects as heuristics in candidate evaluations. We show that exposure to images of candidates featuring such objects can affect perceptions of candidates’ partisanship, but that these cues only very rarely shift perceptions in the face of clear policy information. These findings have important implications for understanding the way that citizens evaluate politics in changing political and media environments.

People rely on photos as memory cues as a means to mitigate the cognitive limitations in encoding, storing, and retrieving experiences, & sometimes treat cameras as an external memory device, offloading their memories onto the camera

Henkel, L. A., Nash, R. A., & Paton, J. A. (2021). “Say cheese!”: How taking and viewing photos can shape memory and cognition. In S. M. Lane & P. Atchley (Eds.), Human capacity in the attention economy (pp. 103–133). American Psychological Association, Jun 2021. https://doi.org/10.1037/0000208-006

Abstract: This chapter explores attention economics in the context of how taking and viewing photos impacts memory and cognition. It explores the interplay between attention and memory in the context of taking and viewing photos. People rely on photos as memory cues as a means to mitigate the cognitive limitations in encoding, storing, and retrieving their experiences. The chapter discusses research that suggests that because of these limitations in attentional and cognitive resources, people sometimes treat cameras as an external memory device—in essence, offloading their memories onto the camera. It explores both the positive and negative consequences for memory of taking and viewing photos by outlining studies of what happens when we divide our attention between experiencing events and documenting them with a camera, and outlining studies on the attentional and memory demands created by the ensuing accumulation of photos.

From 2018... Adult entertainment establishments in NY City decrease daily sex crime between 7% & 13% with no effect on other types of crimes or in other precints; potential sex offenders become customers of the entertainment establishments

The Effects of Adult Entertainment Establishments on Sex Crime: Evidence from New York City. Riccardo Ciacci, Maria Micaela Sviatschi. Princeton Univ, Jun 2018. https://economics.princeton.edu/working-papers/the-effects-of-adult-entertainment-establishments-on-sex-crime-evidence-from-new-york-city/

Abstract: This paper studies how adult entertainment establishments affect sex crime. We build a daily panel that combines the exact location of non-reported sex crimes with the day of opening and exact location of adult entertainment establishments in New York City. We find that these businesses decrease daily sex crime between 7% and 13% in the precinct with no effect on other types of crimes. The results imply that the reduction is mostly driven by potential sex offenders that are now customers of the adult entertainment establishments. We also rule out other mechanisms such as an increase in the number of police officers; a reduction on the number of street prostitution and a possible reduction of potential victims in areas where these businesses opened. The effects are robust to using alternative measures of sex crimes.

Keywords: Sex crimes, rape, adult entertainment establishments, substitute services

JEL codes: I18, J16, J47, K14, K42

From 2018... The Effects of Adult Entertainment Establishments on Sex Crime

Brain volumetric changes in the general population following the COVID-19 outbreak and lockdown: The intense experience induced transient volumetric changes in brain regions commonly associated with stress & anxiety

Brain volumetric changes in the general population following the COVID-19 outbreak and lockdown. Tom Salomon et al. NeuroImage, June 26 2021, 118311. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2021.118311

Abstract: The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak introduced unprecedented health-risks, as well as pressure on the economy, society, and psychological well-being due to the response to the outbreak. In a preregistered study, we hypothesized that the intense experience of the outbreak potentially induced stress-related brain modifications in the healthy population, not infected with the virus. We examined volumetric changes in 50 participants who underwent MRI scans before and after the COVID-19 outbreak and lockdown in Israel. Their scans were compared with those of 50 control participants who were scanned twice prior to the pandemic. Following COVID-19 outbreak and lockdown, the test group participants uniquely showed volumetric increases in bilateral amygdalae, putamen, and the anterior temporal cortices. Changes in the amygdalae diminished as time elapsed from lockdown relief, suggesting that the intense experience associated with the pandemic induced transient volumetric changes in brain regions commonly associated with stress and anxiety. The current work utilizes a rare opportunity for real-life natural experiment, showing evidence for brain plasticity following the COVID-19 global pandemic. These findings have broad implications, relevant both for the scientific community as well as the general public.

3. Discussion

Our study demonstrates that volumetric change patterns in the brain occurred following the COVID-19 initial outbreak period and restrictions in a sample of healthy participants, who were not somatically affected by the pandemic. While previous studies demonstrated brain plasticity using T1-weighted MRI following planned interventions (Maguire et al., 2000, Jung et al., 2013, Draganski et al., 2004), the current work outstands in its unique demonstration of stark structural brain plasticity following a major real-life event.

Our findings show neural changes that were not caused directly due to COVID-19 infection, but rather related to the societal effect, further resonating the mental contagiousness aspect of the COVID-19 pandemic (Valenzano et al., 2020). We show volumetric increase in gray matter in the amygdalae, putamen, and ventral anterior temporal cortices. The changes in the amygdalae showed a temporal-dependent effect, related to the time elapsed from lockdown but not the duration from the baseline scan. It should be noted that although lockdown restrictions had initially reduced infection rates in Israel, just one month after the lockdown was lifted, the number of infected cases started to rise again and reached higher number of active infected cases by the end of data collection, compared with the peak numbers during the actual lockdown period (approximately 2,000 daily new cases by the end of July versus under 750 new daily cases during the peak of the lockdown period in April (Israel Ministry of Health 2020), see detailed timeline in the methods section and Figure 4). This suggests that the effects observed in the current study are less likely to be attributed to the concrete health risks of contracting the virus, but rather to the first wave of the outbreak, characterized with perceived uncertainty and substantial unexpected changes in everyday life.

Figure 4. Study timeline and outbreak data

On February 21st, 2020, the first COVID-19 case in Israel was recorded. Daily new cases were smoothed using 7-days moving average. Data were retrieved and modified based on the Israeli Ministry of Health reports (Israel Ministry of Health 2020, Max et al., 2020). A lockdown was issued on March 25th, which was gradually released until the removal of the 100-meter restriction on May 1st, marking lockdown onset and relief, respectively (shorter vertical dashed line). MRI data of the test group were collected between May 10th to July 29th (longer vertical dashed line). Red bars on top represent the number of participants scanned for the study each day.

Examining the contribution of study features such as volumetric measurements at baseline, the initial study, and scan angle, revealed that the volumetric change effects in the bilateral amygdalae and temporal cortical ROIs, were mostly stable. Although some confirmatory analysis with confounding covariates slightly reduced the significance of the group-time interaction effect, this decrease was relatively small (with significant results before FDR correction), and more importantly, the confounding factor were not significant in any of the models. Thus, it is unlikely that a confound related to the study design could account for the volumetric change effect. Changing the analysis pipeline from surface-based to voxel-based morphometry, resulted in non-significant effect in the Putamen; thus, suggesting that the effect in these nuclei might be susceptible to differences in analysis pipeline. Putatively, the results in these regions change due to different segmentation of the nuclei, registration or smoothing. Therefore, conclusions regarding volumetric change in the Putamen should be more reserved.

The current literature regarding volumetric changes in the amygdala following stressful events, and especially real-life events, is quite limited. Some studies found evidence in agreement with our results, such as one work showing decreased amygdala volume was associated with greater stress reduction following mindfulness training (Hölzel et al., 2009); while others found evidence in the opposite direction, such as one study which found smaller amygdala volumes within participants who were in closer proximity to the World Trade Center during 9/11 events (Ganzel et al., 2008), and overall meta-analyses approach often showing contradicting evidence regarding amygdala volumetric difference within population associated with stress such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and generalized stress disorder (O'Doherty et al., 2015, Duval et al., 2015). Our results, showing a gradual decline of the volumetric change effect as a function of TFL, could provide a potential insight into these inconclusive patterns. It is possible that without time-locking to a strong external event, volumetric change effect would be more difficult to detect. This point highlights the uniqueness of our study that included a repeated session design within with a real-world event.

The current study was in many aspects unplanned; therefore, we are left with only partial answers as to which specific behavioral or cognitive impacts of the COVID-19 outbreak led to the neural changes observed in the healthy participants that took part in our study. The involvement of the amygdala may suggest that stress and anxiety could be the source of the observed phenomenon, due to its well-recorded functional and structural associations (Ganzel et al., 2008, Hölzel et al., 2009, Rogers et al., 2009, Schienle et al., 2011, Mochcovitch et al., 2014, Bryant et al., 2008, Stevens et al., 2017). Nevertheless, it is hard to draw clear conclusions as many aspects of life have changed in this time period, and could have potentially affected different regions in the brain – from limiting social interactions, increased financial stress, changes in physical activity, work routine, and many more. The limited behavioral data collected in the current study did not provide a strong connection to the imaging results, and thus future work could try to better address the complex brain-behavioral associations in this real-life experience.

Furthermore, as our study only examined T1-weighted anatomical scans, we are limited in our scope to gross-anatomy macroscale changes. Imaging research using additional imaging methods such as diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) and functional MRI (fMRI), showed that neural plasticity processes are often characterized by changes of microstructural scale, commonly expressed in the white matter (Sagi et al., 2012, Scholz et al., 2009, Sampaio-Baptista et al., 2013, Steele and Zatorre, 2018) and functional neural activity (Brodt et al., 2018), which were not examined here. Further research combining both more extensive behavioral and imaging measurements might be able to link brain modification with specific behavioral manifestations of COVID-19 outbreak.

Despite these limitations, our findings show that healthy young adults, with no records of mental health issues, were deeply affected by the outbreak of COVID-19. These findings are both ground-breaking in showing brain plasticity of subcortical regions following real-life external event, as well as in revealing an additional impact of the COVID-19 on the well-being of the general public. Our results emphasize the impact of widescale societal changes and suggest that when forming such changes, one should take into consideration the indirect impact on the general well-being of the population, alongside the efficacy of the societal changes.

Motivations—in particular, a need to belong—may be foundational for the development of social essentialism; children consider intentional behaviors performed by in-group members as normative

A Motivational Perspective on the Development of Social Essentialism. Gil Diesendruck. Current Directions in Psychological Science, January 20, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721420980724

Abstract: The tendency to view groups as constituting essentially different categories emerges early in development. To date, most attempts at understanding the origins of this tendency have focused on cognitive processes. Drawing from social-psychological and evolutionary theory, I propose that motivations—in particular, a need to belong—may be foundational for the development of social essentialism. I review evidence indicating that this perspective not only is developmentally plausible but also may explain children’s tendency to consider intentional behaviors performed by in-group members as normative.

Keywords: development, essentialism, motivations, social groups

In the Beginning, There Were “Us”

By 4 to 5 years of age, children’s intergroup attitudes are influenced by perceived power differences between groups. For instance, in a racially diverse sample of South African children, awareness of the status difference between Blacks and Whites was positively correlated with children’s degree of pro-White preference (Olson et al., 2012). Evidently, in order for intergroup power differences to affect children’s tendency to essentialize social groups, children first need to differentiate between groups to which they belong from those they do not.

An awareness of social-group identity arguably takes years to congeal (Nesdale, 2004). This process may be expedited by contextual factors, such as living in a society with salient intergroup conflicts, in which schools (Deeb et al., 2011) or parents (Segall et al., 2015) may transmit to children the crucial group identities constituting their society. Thus, by the time they are 5 to 6 years old, their budding social identity may already impact their essentializing tendencies.

I propose that yet a third type of motivation that might be particularly effective for propelling social essentialism in the early years is the evolutionarily basic need to belong (Baumeister & Leary, 1995). It might take a few years for young children to map the social categories instituted by their culture and then figure out their power relations. But from earlier on, they need to find out whom they can trust for providing them sustenance, protection, and cultural knowledge (Pietraszewski et al., 2014). They need to know whom they should affiliate with.

Indeed, recent work indicates that such an affiliative motivation seems to affect even infants’ social preferences and concepts. For instance, 18-month-olds were more likely to help others after being cued for affiliative interactions (Over & Carpenter, 2009), and 14-month-olds were more likely to imitate arbitrary actions modeled by a speaker of their language than those modeled by a speaker of a foreign language (Buttelmann et al., 2013). Furthermore, whereas 10-month-olds have been found to hold positive associations regarding individuals familiar to them on some dimension, they did not evince a negative association regarding individuals unfamiliar to them (Pun et al., 2018). In other words, affect was attached to the in-group proxy, not the out-group, suggesting the primacy of a positive motivation—for example, affiliation—as a driver of intergroup attitudes. Finally, exposing White 14-month-olds to brief videos of an affiliative interaction between two White actresses boosted infants’ subsequent racial (White vs. Black) categorization of women (Ferera et al., 2018).

The above studies expose a certain conundrum affecting young children’s social-group cognition. On the one hand, they have a bursting need to belong to a group; on the other, they are at a loss as to how to define and conceptualize the group (Liberman et al., 2017). I propose that this tension drives young children to reify cues they regularly observe in similar social partners. In other words, in their pursuit to feel safe in their belongingness to a group, young children will be drawn to construe such observable cues as proxies for essences. I propose that children do exactly that, treating people’s intentional actions as such proxies.

Children’s Pursuit of Our Essence

If group essences are permanent, mandatory, inherent, and exclusive characteristics of distinct groups and if intentional behaviors are to serve as proxies for such essences, then children should treat intentional behaviors as having the above characteristics. It turns out that they do.

First, from a young age, children expect various intentional actions—even arbitrary ones—to be mandatory and actively complain when others deviate from a modeled action (Schmidt & Rakoczy, 2018). In fact, children expect other people to replicate causally irrelevant intentional actions with high fidelity, and they themselves do so—a phenomenon described as overimitation (Hoehl et al., 2019).

Second, children seem to be particularly zealous in their normativization of group-related arbitrary actions (Roberts et al., 2017). For instance, Hindu 9-year-olds judged that only Hindus should conform to Hindu norms and only Muslims to Muslim norms (Srinivasan et al., 2019). In other words, children endorse behavioral norms in a group-bounded fashion. In fact, anthropological, correlational, and experimental studies indicate that participation in ritualistic conventional actions may be particularly effective for fostering group affiliation (Watson-Jones & Legare, 2016).

Third and finally, the above zealousness is most strongly manifest for in-group norms. Infants are selectively adamant about overimitating in-group models (Buttelmann et al., 2013), and young children are automatically biased to imitate in-group models (Essa et al., 2019). Moreover, children are particularly judgmental about in-group members’ violations of conventional norms (Schmidt et al., 2012), a tendency that increases with children’s developing expectations about the cohesiveness of their group (Killen et al., 2013).

In young children’s eyes, everything “we” do is done because that is who we are. Children’s normativization of group-bound intentional actions provides them assurances that they belong to a group that is stable, unique, and exclusive, in other words, an essentialist-like group.

Fictions with imaginary worlds should be more appealing for individuals higher in Openness to experience, for younger people, & be more successful in more economically developed societies

Why imaginary worlds? Exploratory preferences explain the cultural success of fictions with imaginary worlds in modern societies. Edgar Dubourg. Human Behavior & Evolution Society HBES 2021, Jun-Jul 2021. https://osf.io/bz26m Poster: https://osf.io/tw8fp/?pid=bz26m

Abstract: Imaginary worlds are one of the hallmarks of modern culture. They are present in many of the most successful fictions, be it in novels (e.g., Harry Potter), films (e.g., Star Wars), video games (e.g., The Legend of Zelda), graphic novels (e.g., One piece) and TV series (e.g., Game of Thrones). This phenomenon is global (e.g., the emergence of xuanhuan and xanxia genres in China), and massive (e.g., the worldwide success of Lord of the Ring). Why so much attention devoted to nonexistent worlds? We propose that imaginary worlds in fictions co-opt exploratory preferences. Imaginary worlds are fictional superstimuli that tap into the human’s evolved interest for unfamiliar and potentially rewarding environments. This hypothesis can explain the cultural success of specific artefacts, such as maps in fictions, and the cultural distribution of such fictions across time, space, and individuals. Notably, this hypothesis makes predictions that rely on previous research in psychological and behavioral sciences: 1) fictions with imaginary worlds should be more appealing for individuals higher in Openness to experience (because this Big Five personality trait is associated with exploratory preferences), 2) such fictions should be more attractive for younger people (because young people reap more reward from exploratory behaviors, thanks to parental investments, and are thus adaptively more motivated to explore) and 3) such fictions should be more successful in more economically developed societies (because affluent and safe ecologies lower the costs of exploration, and phenotypic plasticity thus promotes exploratory preferences). We successively tested these predictions with two large open-collaborative datasets, namely IMDb (N=85,855 films) and Wikidata (N=96,711 literary works), and with the Movie Personality Dataset, which aggregates averaged personality traits and demographic data from the Facebook myPersonality Database (N=3.5 million). We provide evidence that the appeal for imaginary worlds relies on our exploratory psychology.

Modern racial categorization may be a byproduct of a system designed for ancestral alliance detection; phenotype-based classifications are suppressed when valid cues of allegiance are made

A Sufficiency Test of the Alliance Hypothesis of Race. Daniel Conroy-Beam. Human Behavior & Evolution Society HBES 2021, Jun-Jul 2021. https://osf.io/4rqhs

Abstract: Racial categorization is a widespread phenomenon at the root of many of the most pressing problems in modern human life. These facts are peculiar from an evolutionary perspective given that racial categories as we understand them today are not biologically real and are evolutionarily novel inventions. The alliance hypothesis of race attempts to reconcile these facts by proposing that modern racial categorization is a byproduct of a system designed for ancestral alliance detection. Support for this hypothesis comes from studies demonstrating that redirecting coalitional psychology can suppress racial categorization. However, the capacity of coalitional psychology to generate racial categories from scratch is less clear. Here we use a series of agent-based models to provide a sufficiency test of the alliance hypothesis. We generate populations of agents that vary on arbitrary phenotypic dimensions and engage in cooperative interactions with one another. We show that the introduction of a coalitional psychology that attempts to detect patterns of allegiance based on available cues can hallucinate and then reify correlations between phenotype and allegiance, leading to the emergence of social groups that vary systematically by phenotype. This occurs even when phenotype is in reality distributed continuously and has no true connection to behavior. Furthermore, consistent with psychological evidence, such phenotypic classification is suppressed when valid cues of allegiance are made available. These models provide evidence that a coalitional psychology alone can be sufficient to create beliefs in phenotype-based social categories even when no such categories truly exist.

It is more permissible to harm a few animals to save a greater number of animals than to harm a few humans to save a greater number of humans, even when animals are described as having greater suffering capacity than some humans

Caviola, L., Kahane, G., Everett, J. A. C., Teperman, E., Savulescu, J., & Faber, N. S. (2021). Utilitarianism for animals, Kantianism for people? Harming animals and humans for the greater good. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 150(5), 1008–1039. Jun 2021. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0000988

Abstract: Most people hold that it is wrong to sacrifice some humans to save a greater number of humans. Do people also think that it is wrong to sacrifice some animals to save a greater number of animals, or do they answer such questions about harm to animals by engaging in a utilitarian cost-benefit calculation? Across 10 studies (N = 4,662), using hypothetical and real-life sacrificial moral dilemmas, we found that participants considered it more permissible to harm a few animals to save a greater number of animals than to harm a few humans to save a greater number of humans. This was explained by a reduced general aversion to harm animals compared with humans, which was partly driven by participants perceiving animals to suffer less and to have lower cognitive capacity than humans. However, the effect persisted even in cases where animals were described as having greater suffering capacity and greater cognitive capacity than some humans, and even when participants felt more socially connected to animals than to humans. The reduced aversion to harming animals was thus also partly due to speciesism—the tendency to ascribe lower moral value to animals due to their species-membership alone. In sum, our studies show that deontological constraints against instrumental harm are not absolute but get weaker the less people morally value the respective entity. These constraints are strongest for humans, followed by dogs, chimpanzees, pigs, and finally inanimate objects.

The caution observed in medical decisions does not replicate in financial decisions with large amounts; in fact, risk-taking was accentuated for large amounts in the gain domain

Batteux, E., Ferguson, E., & Tunney, R. J. (2021). Do we become more cautious for others when large amounts of money are at stake? Experimental Psychology, 68(1), 32–40. Jun 2021. https://doi.org/10.1027/1618-3169/a000508

Abstract: A considerable proportion of financial decisions are made by agents acting on behalf of other people. Although people are more cautious for others when making medical decisions, this does not seem to be the case for economic decisions. However, studies with large amounts of money are particularly absent from the literature, which precludes a clear comparison to studies in the medical domain. To address this gap, we investigated the effect of outcome magnitude in two experiments where participants made choices between safe and risky options. Decision-makers were not more cautious for others over large amounts. In fact, risk-taking was accentuated for large amounts in the gain domain. We did not find self-other differences in the loss domain for either outcome magnitude. This suggests that the caution observed in medical decisions does not replicate in financial decisions with large amounts, or at least not in the same way. These results echo the concerns that have been raised about excessive risk-taking by financial agents.

Toddlers from an indigenous people were considerably less likely to recognize themselves in the mirror, possibly due to lack of being imitated by their mothers

Cebioğlu, S., & Broesch, T. (2021). Explaining cross-cultural variation in mirror self-recognition: New insights into the ontogeny of objective self-awareness. Developmental Psychology, 57(5), 625–638. May 2021. https://doi.org/10.1037/dev0001171

Abstract: Mirror self-recognition (MSR) is considered to be the benchmark of objective self-awareness—the ability to think about oneself. Cross-cultural research showed that there are systematic differences in toddlers’ MSR abilities between 18 and 24 months. Understanding whether these differences result from systematic variation in early social experiences will help us understand the processes through which objective self-awareness develops. In this study, we examined 57 18- to 22-month-old toddlers (31 girls) and their mothers from two distinct sociocultural contexts: urban Canada (58% of the subsample were Canadian-born native English-speakers) and rural Vanuatu, a small-scale island society located in the South Pacific. We had two main goals: (a) to identify the social-interactional correlates of MSR ability in this cross-cultural sample, and (b) to examine whether differences in passing rates could be attributed to confounding factors. Consistent with previous cross-cultural research, ni-Vanuatu toddlers passed the MSR test at significantly lower rates (7%) compared to their Canadian counterparts (68%). Among a suite of social interactive variables, only mothers’ imitation of their toddlers’ behavior during a free play session predicted MSR in the entire sample and maternal imitation partially mediated the effects of culture on MSR. In addition, low passing rates among ni-Vanuatu toddlers could not be attributed to reasons unrelated to self-development (i.e., motivation to show mark-directed behavior, understanding mirror-correspondence, representational thinking). This suggests that differences in MSR passing rates reflect true differences in self-recognition, and that parental imitation may have an important role in shaping the construction of visual self-knowledge in toddlers.

People With Larger Social Networks Show Poorer Voice Recognition

People With Larger Social Networks Show Poorer Voice Recognition. Shiri Lev-Ari. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, June 24, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1177/17470218211030798

Abstract: The way we process language is influenced by our experience. We are more likely to attend to features that proved to be useful in the past. Importantly, the size of individuals’ social network can influence their experience, and consequently, how they process language. In the case of voice recognition, having a larger social network might provide more variable input and thus enhance the ability to recognize new voices. On the other hand, learning to recognize voices is more demanding and less beneficial for people with a larger social network as they have more speakers to learn yet spend less time with each. This paper tests whether social network size influences voice recognition, and if so, in which direction. Native Dutch speakers listed their social network and performed a voice recognition task. Results showed that people with larger social networks were poorer at learning to recognize voices. Experiment 2 replicated the results with a British sample and English stimuli. Experiment 3 showed that the effect does not generalize to voice recognition in an unfamiliar language suggesting that social network size influences attention to the linguistic rather than non-linguistic markers that differentiate speakers. The studies thus show that our social network size influences our inclination to learn speaker-specific patterns in our environment, and consequently the development of skills that rely on such learned patterns, such as voice recognition.

Keywords: voice recognition, talker identification, social network size, social networks

Beyond Aesthetic Judgment: Beauty Increases Moral Standing Through Perceptions of Purity

Beyond Aesthetic Judgment: Beauty Increases Moral Standing Through Perceptions of Purity. Christoph Klebl, Yin Luo, Brock Bastian. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, June 24, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1177/01461672211023648

Abstract: Researchers have tended to focus on mind perception as integral to judgments of moral standing, yet a smaller body of evidence suggests that beauty may also be an important factor (for some people and animals). Across six studies (N = 1,662), we investigated whether beauty increases moral standing attributions to a wide range of targets, including non-sentient entities, and explored the psychological mechanism through which beauty assigns moral standing to targets. We found that people attribute greater moral standing to beautiful (vs. ugly) animals (Study 1 and Study 5a, preregistered) and humans (Study 2). This effect also extended to non-sentient targets, that is, people perceive beautiful (vs. ugly) landscapes (Study 3) and buildings (Study 4 and Study 5b, preregistered) as possessing greater moral standing. Across all studies, perceptions of purity mediated the effect of beauty on moral standing, suggesting that beauty increases the moral standing individuals place on targets through evoking moral intuitions of purity.

Keywords: beauty, aesthetic judgment, moral standing, purity

Check also Beauty of the Beast: Beauty as an important dimension in the moral standing of animals. Christoph Klebl et al. Journal of Environmental Psychology, May 7 2021, 101624. https://www.bipartisanalliance.com/2021/05/beauty-perceptions-causally-influenced.html

Work with infants suggests that the adaptive problems humans faced with respect to plants have left their mark on the human mind

From 2019... How Plants Shape the Mind. Annie E.Wertz. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Volume 23, Issue 7, July 2019, Pages 528-531. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2019.04.009

Full PDF: How Plants Shape the Mind (miami.edu)

Abstract: Plants are easy to overlook in modern environments, but were a fundamental part of human life over evolutionary time. Recent work with infants suggests that the adaptive problems humans faced with respect to plants have left their mark on the human mind.

Keywords: cognitive evolutionplantssocial learningavoidanceinfancy

Full text, references, photos, charts, in the PDF above

Plants Are A(n Adaptive) Problem

In many societies, plants are no longer a conspicuous part of human life. Plants are a part of the scenery outside and available for purchase, already packaged and processed, in grocery stores and garden centers. This limited contact with plants may seem perfectly normal, but across the entirety of human history it is quite unusual. Taking as a starting point the emergence of the genus Homo, humans spent 99% of our evolutionary history as hunter–gatherers. In a hunter–gatherer world, there were no such shops where the necessities of life could be easily acquired. Instead, our ancestors had to make a living by effectively utilizing the natural environment. Plants were an essential part of this process.

The archeological record and studies of modern hunter–gatherer and hunter–horticulturalist populations show that humans relied on plants in a variety of ways [1].

Plants are an important component of human diets, particularly the roots, fruits, and nuts of plants. Plant materials are used to construct a diverse array of artifacts and shelters. Plant chemicals are used to facilitate hunting and fishing, as well as in rituals and medicines. However, despite all of these benefits, plants can inflict serious costs. Plants have evolved an impressive set of defenses to protect against damage from herbivores [2]. All plants produce toxic chemical defenses, some of which can be harmful or even fatal to humans when ingested. Some plants also have mechanical defenses, such as thorns or stinging hairs, that can cause serious skin injury and in some cases systemic effects.

The problem is: how do humans figure out which plants are food (or otherwise useful) and which ones are fatal? This turns out to be a very difficult task. There are myriad plant species and herbivores that feed on them. The result of these complex coevolutionary relationships is that, from a human perspective, there are no morphological features common to all edible or toxic plants, even in the scale of the environments humans typically encounter without modern means of travel. Therefore, using general rules such as ‘Avoid plants with white flowers’ or ‘Purple fruits are edible’ simply would not work. In the former case, one would miss out on pears, and in the latter one would end up eating deadly nightshade. Importantly, the presence of difficult-to-detect and potentially fatal toxins makes learning about plants through trial and error sampling very costly. The best outcome for this process involves large amounts of wasted time and repeated exposure to noxious plant defenses. The worst-case scenario is death. These kinds of circumstances select for the evolution of social learning mechanisms [3].

The recurrent adaptive problems our species encountered over evolutionary time have shaped the human mind [4] and it is well known that plant defenses have structured the physiology and behavior of many animal species [2], including humans [5].  Accordingly, along with my colleagues, I have recently proposed a solution for the learning problems plants pose. We argue that the human mind contains a collection of behavioral avoidance strategies and social learning rules geared toward safely acquiring information about plants [6,7]. I will refer to this collection of cognitive systems as Plant Learning and Avoidance of Natural Toxins, or PLANT.

Evidence for PLANT

We have begun testing PLANT with studies of human infants. One line of work examines whether infants possess behavioral strategies that would mitigate plant dangers, similar to plant food rejections in older children [8]. Unlike the animate dangers that infants readily attend to (e.g., snakes, spiders [9]), dangerous plant toxins are difficult to detect but relatively easy to avoid. Plants are quite literally rooted to the spot and consequently can inflict harm only on individuals that come into contact with them. Therefore, we propose that PLANT includes behavioral avoidance strategies that protect infants by minimizing their physical contact with plants. To test this proposal, we present infants with plants and different kinds of control objects and measure their reaching behavior (Figure 1). Our results show that, as predicted, infants are reluctant to touch plants compared with other object types [7,10,11] and touch plants less frequently after making contact with them [10]. Infants are similarly avoidant of benign-looking plants and plants covered in sharp-looking thorns [10], suggesting that they initially treat all plants as potentially dangerous – a sensible strategy given that delicate-ooking plants can be deadly poisonous.

Of course, not all plants can be avoided.  Plant foods and materials must be foraged, which necessarily means coming into contact with plants. In some modern hunter–gatherer societies, plant foraging can begin as early as 2–3 years of age [1]. Therefore, in a second line of work, we are investigating whether infants are vigilant for social information about plants and use it to guide their behavior. These studies allow us to test the proposal that PLANT includes social learning rules.

Thus far, we have found that infants look more often to adults when they first encounter plants, in the time before touching them [11], suggesting that behavioral avoidance strategies operate in concert with social learning processes. This structure would enable infants to observe signals from adults before making contact with potentially dangerous plants. Infants appear to be particularly attuned to social signals that allow them to learn which plants are edible [6,12]. In our studies, we show 6- and 18-month-olds an adult eating pieces of fruit from a plant and a manmade object (Figure 2A).

Despite seeing the same social information demonstrated with both object types, infants identify the plant, over the artifact, as a food source [6]. Once infants have learned that fruits from a particular plant are edible, 18-month-olds generalize this information only to other plants that share the same leaf shape and fruit color [12]. This combination of social learning and restrictive generalization rules would prevent infants from inadvertently ingesting toxic plants.

Seeing the Forest for the Trees

Our empirical findings to date are consistent with the proposed PLANT systems.  Infants appear to deploy a collection of behavioral avoidance strategies and social learning rules for plants. Consequently, PLANT minimizes infants’ exposure to harmful plant defenses and allows them to safely acquire information about the specific plants they encounter from more knowledgeable individuals. In short, this work supports the claim that plants have shaped the human mind.

PLANT is a novel research area that provides fertile ground for future exploration (Figure 2). Of particular interest are cross-cultural studies that can shed light on the development of PLANT in different environments and comparative studies that can clarify the evolution of PLANT. Further, the integral role that plants played in human life and human evolution means that PLANT is likely to be enmeshed in a web of cognitive systems that support broader capacities like food learning, threat mitigation, categorization, and cultural transmission, among others. This interconnectedness makes PLANT an excellent starting point for future inquiry in these areas. At the same time, it is highly unlikely that infants, or adults for that matter, will treat plants as a special category in all circumstances. Research on cognitive systems like PLANT can provide new ways of exploring fundamental aspects of human cognition and understanding the evolution of learning.

Results robustly show that humans across the Globe (25 countries, 6 continents) respond with stronger preferences for dominant leaders when they find themselves in contexts of intergroup conflict

Intergroup Conflict and Preferences for Dominant Leaders: Testing Universal Features of Human Followership Psychology across 25 Countries. Lasse Laustsen, Xiaotian Sheng, Mark van Vugt. Human Behavior & Evolution Society HBES 2021, Jun-Jul 2021. https://www.hbes.com/hbes2021/

Abstract: Research shows that followers exhibit heightened preferences for dominant leaders in situations of intergroup conflict and coalitional competition (e.g. Little et al., 2007; Spisak et al., 2012; Laustsen & Petersen, 2017). Accordingly, humans are theorized to possess an evolved psychology of adaptive followership that flexibly regulates preferences for leader dominance in accordance with levels of intergroup conflict (Laustsen & Petersen, 2015). However, existing research is based exclusively on studies conducted in the US or Western Europe. Consequently, the central claim that the adaptive followership psychology constitutes a human universal remains untested. This project tests if followers across the Globe-spanning 25 countries (across six continents) such as Colombia, Kenya, Pakistan, Hungary and China-hold stronger preferences for dominant leaders during intergroup conflict. Building on existing experimental protocols, subjects we assigned subjects randomly to either an intergroup conflict condition or a no-conflict condition asking them to choose their favored leader from dominant and non-dominant looking alternatives. Results robustly show that humans across the Globe respond with stronger preferences for dominant leaders when they find themselves in contexts of intergroup conflict. Hence, the project provides unique and unprecedented support for the notion of a universal and context sensitive human followership psychology.

Testing the buffering hypothesis: Breastfeeding problems, cessation, and social support in the UK

Testing the buffering hypothesis: Breastfeeding problems, cessation, and social support in the UK. Abigail E. Page, Emily H. Emmott, Sarah Myers. American Journal of Human Biology, May 30 2021. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajhb.23621

Abstract

Objectives: Physical breastfeeding problems can lead women to terminate breastfeeding earlier than planned. In high-income countries such as the UK, breastfeeding problems have been attributed to the cultural and individual “inexperience” of breastfeeding, ultimately leading to lower breastfeeding rates. Yet, cross-cultural evidence suggests breastfeeding problems still occur in contexts where breastfeeding is common, prolonged, and seen publicly. This suggests breastfeeding problems are not unusual and do not necessarily lead to breastfeeding cessation. As humans evolved to raise children cooperatively, what matters for breastfeeding continuation may be the availability of social support during the postnatal period. Here, we test the hypothesis that social support buffers mothers from the negative impact breastfeeding problems have on duration.

Methods: We run Cox models on a sample of 565 UK mothers who completed a retrospective online survey about infant feeding and social support in 2017–2018.

Results: Breastfeeding problems were important predictors of cessation; however, the direction of the effect was dependent on the problem type and type of support from a range of supporters. Helpful support for discomfort issues (blocked ducts, too much milk) was significantly associated with reduced hazards of cessation, as predicted. However, helpful support for reported milk insufficiency was assoicated with an increased hazard of cessation.

Conclusions: Experiencing breastfeeding problems is the norm, but its impact may be mitigated via social support. Working from an interdisciplinary approach, our results highlight that a wide range of supporters who provide different types of support have potential to influence maternal breastfeeding experience.

5 DISCUSSION

In our sample of 565 relatively affluent and well-educated women from the UK, we find that almost everyone reported problems breastfeeding, underlining that breastfeeding problems are the norm rather than the exception. Such problems potentially explain why, as reported elsewhere, 71% of respondents who stopped breastfeeding prior to 8 weeks found infant feeding stressful and 60% emotionally draining (Myers et al., 2021). As women often report feeling unprepared, abnormal and isolated when they encounter common issues (Brown, 2016; Wall, 2001), every attempt should be made to inform women antenatally that breastfeeding is a learnt behavior (Varki et al., 2008) and how best to prepare for, and overcome, future challenges (Brown, 2016; Emmott et al., 2020b).

The women in this study were, overall, well-supported. Unhelpful support was rarely reported, and women frequently indicated a wide range of supporters as providing helpful support. Partners were documented as particularly helpful, as were midwives and health visitors. Beyond these well-established supporters, we also see that the mother's mothers (infant's maternal grandmothers), friends and sisters were also providing helpful support across informational, practical and emotional domains. This indicates that multidimensional social support is an important feature of the postnatal period in the UK, even though women, especially those who are more highly educated, frequently live further from family and friends (Chan & Ermisch, 2015). As we have argued previously (Emmott et al., 2020a, 2021; Emmott & Mace, 2015; Myers et al., 2021), the benefit of an evolutionary anthropological approach is the exploration of investment transfers to mothers from a wide range of supporters due to the emphasis on cooperative childrearing (Emmott & Page, 2019). An evolutionary framework highlights that there are many mechanisms by which support can work, and support which can facilitate breastfeeding need not be limited to health care professionals.

5.1 Hypothesis 1: Breastfeeding problems increase the likelihood of cessation

While breastfeeding problems are frequently reported as reasons to stop breastfeeding (Dewey et al., 2003; DiGirolamo et al., 2005; Verronen, 1982), our results highlight that different types of problems have different associations with breastfeeding cessation. As is demonstrated consistently in other studies (Ahluwalia et al., 2005; Ingram et al., 2002; Kirkland & Fein, 2003; Lamontagne et al., 2008), we find that women who reported not having enough breast milk, or struggling to obtain a good latch, were much more likely to terminate breastfeeding within 3 months. These two problems can be understood as relating to infants' nutritional intake (Ingram et al., 2002; Kirkland & Fein, 2003; Li et al., 2008; Verronen, 1982), as a poor latch can result in less efficient feeding. Some have suggested that insufficient milk is often provided as a reason for stopping breastfeeding because the focus on the infant's wellbeing is a more “acceptable” reason to terminate breastfeeding within a society which often relates breastfeeding to “good” mothering (Ingram et al., 2002; Whelan & Lupton, 1998). While we have no data that can directly speak to whether insufficient milk was overreported, it is worth noting it was the second least reported problem. We also did not ask women why they stopped breastfeeding, thus reducing the motivation to inaccurately report and increasing confidence that insufficient milk was perceived to be an actual problem by participants. In contrast, we found that women who reported having problems with blocked ducts, mastitis, sore nipples or too much breast milk were less likely to terminate breastfeeding. These problems can be conceptualized as relating more to mothers' (not insignificant) pain and discomfort, or issues which require management (i.e., pumping excess milk) (Binns & Scott, 2002). Some women may be more able to endure issues of breastfeeding when it is at their own cost, rather than their infant's, which may relate to common parenting ideals focused on intensive mothering—a primarily white, middle-class emphasis on child centered and self-sacrificial parenting (Reyes-Foster & Carter, 2018). Therefore, as argued by Fahy and Holschier (1988), successful breastfeeding occurs not in the absence of problems, but in the mother's ability to overcome these problems (Binns & Scott, 2002).

5.2 Hypothesis 2: Social support will moderate the negative relationship between breastfeeding problems and cessation

In the un-moderated model, blocked ducts and too much breast milk were associated with reduced hazards of breastfeeding termination. However, by exploring the interactions between social support and breastfeeding problems, it was evident that this effect was driven by support that was considered helpful. Across the blocked ducts models, the lowest hazards of stopping breastfeeding were associated with helpful practical and informational support. Furthermore, women who had issues around blocked ducts or too much breast milk and reported unhelpful informational support (from friends, partners and midwives) were more likely to stop breastfeeding prior to 3 months. It has been reported elsewhere that inconsistent conflicting advice from HCPs results in mothers becoming frustrated, confused and more likely to cease breastfeeding (Garner et al., 2016; Ingram et al., 2002; Lamontagne et al., 2008). While we cannot speak to the specifics of the informational support received by our participants, our results nonetheless indicate that this effect may go beyond HCPs, with unhelpful advice from partners and friends having similar effects.

Contra to predictions, rather than reducing the negative impact of milk insufficiency on duration, support of all types—but particularly emotional support—from sisters, health visitors and midwives was associated with increased likelihoods of cessation. While the direction of causality is unknown, this relationship may be related to a woman's support needs. After experiencing perceived milk insufficiency mothers may wish to switch to formula to ensure infant's weight gain. Thus, informational and practical support may help them wean their infants. Supporters who empathize with a mother's situation or affirm her decision to stop breastfeeding may be experienced as being emotionally supportive. Levels of breastfeeding intent in our sample were high (Myers et al., 2021), potentially increasing the importance of emotional support for women who decide to stop early. This may be particularly important in a UK context where breastfeeding is currently heavily promoted, thus to cease breastfeeding is to go against a central tenant of the prevailing, White middle-class mothering discourse (Crossley, 2009; Faircloth, 2015; Kukla, 2006; Lee, 2007). While our study did not explore women's mental wellbeing, the relationship between breastfeeding expectations, problems and postnatal depression has been well documented (Brown et al., 2016; Shakespeare et al., 2004). This highlights that social support during the postnatal period is not only about prolonging breastfeeding but also about supporting mothers mental wellbeing (Emmott et al., 2020b; Trickey, 2018; UNICEF, 2018).

As indicated above, emotional support goes beyond friends and family. In our interaction models, emotional support moderated the relationship between various problems and duration when it originated from all types of health professionals. Graffy and Taylor (2005), in a qualitative analysis of interviews with 654 women from the UK, report that although women requested informational support, women were more often sensitive to the way HCPs treated them. Alongside practical tips and guidance, they wanted acknowledgement of their experiences and to be reassured that issues during breastfeeding were normal, and thus were encouraged to continue. Clearly, emotional support from HCPs has an important role to play. This is highlighted by the negative impact that poor emotional support from GPs had in our study. Emotionally unsupportive GPs could be increasing maternal stress, making breastfeeding more difficult and further adding to mothers' concerns. Conversely, emotional support, through acknowledgement, reassurance and encouragement (Graffy & Taylor, 2005) may increase a mother's self-efficacy to deal with latching, or other issues.

Support from a wide range of sources interacted with breastfeeding problems to predict duration. However, no significant effects were found for the mother's mother, father and brothers. This result is perhaps less surprising for brothers, given their lower levels of helpful support apparent in Figure 1, but much more surprising for mothers' mothers as they have been identified as key supporters of women in the postpartum period and beyond (Scelza, 2009; Scelza & Hinde, 2019; Sear & Coall, 2011; Sear & Mace, 2008; Snopkowski & Sear, 2015). It may be that our sample lacks the variance required to explore our question in relation to mother's mothers, as the vast majority of women reported helpful support from them. Further analyses in a more diverse sample may help unpack this. Peer supporters also demonstrated a different trend, in which the hazard of termination was the lowest when their support was absent. This probably stems from the fact that unlike GPs, health visitors and midwives, not everyone will encounter a peer supporter (as indicated in Figure 1) and likely only do so when they are facing considerable problems. Therefore, those people receiving help from peer supporters may already be more likely to stop breastfeeding.

5.3 Hypothesis 3: The type of support impacts the moderating effect

Practical support is framed within evolutionary approaches as reducing, or having the potential to reduce, a mother's workload, meaning mothers will have more energy to invest in tasks which maximize lifetime fitness, as construed in the current environment (Emmott & Page, 2019; Kramer & Veile, 2018; Meehan et al., 2013; Page et al., 2021). Consequently, while not true of all types of practical support (e.g., allofeeding—individuals other than the mother feeding the infant [Emmott & Mace, 2015; Myers et al., 2021]), overall, practical support is hypothesized to increase breastfeeding duration. In our sample, in which the majority expressed a wish to breastfeed (Myers et al., 2021), mothers who received helpful practical support from family members may have been able to focus on breastfeeding. This additional energy devoted to breastfeeding may have allowed them to work through problems, providing the time required to access specialist breastfeeding support.

Interestingly, in our sample, moderating practical support was received from the partner's parents (the infant's paternal grandparents), rather than the mothers' parents (the infant's maternal grandparents). Who helps mothers is likely to be partially context specific; nonetheless, evolutionary theories of kinship do predict differential investment by paternal and maternal grandparents (Beise, 2005; Gibson & Mace, 2005; Sear, 2008; Sear & Coall, 2011), suggesting that relatives from different lineages may invest in different types of supportive activities (Sear & Mace, 2008). However, it may also be the case that, as noted above, there is simply more variance in partner's family for us to pick up on these trends. It is also important to note that, by focusing on helpfulness, in this analysis we have explored all types of practical support collectively, combining allofeeding with other forms of practical support. Since allofeeding has been demonstrated to have a negative relationship with breastfeeding duration (Emmott & Mace, 2015), this may be confounding results in relation to supporters most likely to perform allofeeding—which in this sample are the partner and mother's mother (Myers et al., 2021).

Our data indicate that emotional and practical support were important moderators; however, contra predictions, so was informational support. While this hypothesis was not formally designed to separate the independent effects of emotional, practical and informational support, we did see that informational support was the most frequent moderator, and the receipt of helpful informational support was often associated with a lower likelihood of breastfeeding cessation. This underlines the fact that breastfeeding is a learnt behavior (Volk, 2009) and suggests while women benefit from practical and emotional support helping them to persist in spite of problems, informational support may curtail the duration of the problem itself. It may also be that the usefulness of informational support is dependent on its delivery alongside emotional support (Fallon et al., 2017; Fallon et al., 2019; Trickey, 2018). Future work should tease out these effects in greater depth.

Informational support was not limited to HCP but also received from partners, sisters and friends. Similar results have been found elsewhere; for example, Swedish mothers whose own mothers had discussed breastfeeding with them were more likely to breastfeed for longer, reporting greater increased confidence (Ekström et al., 2003). This demonstrates the importance of information and advice from a range of supporters. Consequently, researchers and public health specialists need to consider where else information is coming from and how to direct (helpful) information-based interventions beyond the mother (Daniele et al., 2018; Negin et al., 2016; Wolfberg et al., 2004).

Our focus on the physiological experience of breastfeeding problems and the individual experience of social support is not to suggest that wider socioeconomic and political factors are not key predictors of breastfeeding, nor is it easy to untangle the impact of behavior, norms and structural factors (Palmquist & Doehler, 2014). There are large inequalities in infant feeding experience along structural lines in the UK and similar HIC (Victora et al., 2016), contributing to socioeconomic gradients in inflammation and infant weight (McDade & Koning, 2021). These inequalities exist due to cultural and religious norms around breastfeeding, particularly in public (Chang et al., 2021), access to social support (Grubesic & Durbin, 2020; Tomori, 2009), opportunity costs of breastfeeding (Hough et al., 2018; Tully & Ball, 2018), as well having convenient and quick-to-access places to breastfeed (Brown et al., 2020; Hauck et al., 2020). Furthermore, the experience of breastfeeding problems is unlikely to be evenly distributed as one study found that young, unmarried and non-college educated US women were more likely to experience breastfeeding problems resulting in disrupted lactation (Stuebe et al., 2014). Therefore, our results may be underplaying the importance of breastfeeding problems given our sample of educated, affluent white women, who likely have privileged access to formal and informal social support. Here, we have demonstrated the importance of variation in social support in moderating the relationship between breastfeeding problems and duration, but further research with a more diverse sample is required to explore what causes variations in this support.

5.4 Limitations

We have already noted that our sample is a key limitation in this research. While 565 women is not an insignificant sample size, there was a lack of diversity in breastfeeding durations and support received. This is a product of the homogenous nature of our sample, which is largely educated, affluent and white—a clear limitation of this study. As a result, statistical power was likely an issue in our models increasing the likelihood of Type II errors. For this reason, while we often see nonoverlapping confidence intervals between helpful and unhelpful support, the intervals for unhelpful support are often wide and spanning one making interpretation difficult. Our sample was recruited online using convenience-sampling, which likely biased it to more affluent women (Topolovec-Vranic & Natarajan, 2016). This issue is not uncommon within survey-based breastfeeding studies and should be addressed in future research. Middle-class, more affluent women have the time, energy and desire to engage with scientific studies; more needs to be done to make this process low cost and desirable to a wider demographic. An additional concern with online-based data collection are programs which automatically fill in surveys (e.g., bots) (Dupuis et al., 2019) and low effort respondents, both which are likely to occur when financial incentive is offered for survey completion (Buchanan & Scofield, 2018). No financial incentive was offered for the present survey, reducing our concern regarding bots—which is further diminished by the absence of suspiciously rapid completion times. Furthermore, the majority (78.6%) of respondents invested significant effort into responding to a number of optional open-text questions (not used in this analysis, but utilized in Emmott et al. (2020a))—these would be expected to be skipped by low-effort respondents and either skipped, answered incoherently, or repetitively by bots, which data exploration points against.

The second limitation is the potential for reporting bias due to the retrospective design of this study. We asked women with children aged up to 24 months of age about the problems they experienced and support they received since giving birth. Women may forget key early events in the light of later ones, and the perceived severity of a problem is likely impacted by the severity of later ones (Williamson et al., 2012). Further, given the retrospective nature of this study we have captured breastfeeding problems in a simplistic fashion. Our binary measure of yes/no hides variation in severity, duration, and number of occurrences as well as varying causes or exacerbating factors (such as maternal or infant factors). Prospective study designs are better-suited to explore the causal relationship between support, problems and breastfeeding—all factors which fluctuate on a daily basis—and we encourage their future use.