Language evolution: Words for negative concepts are replaced faster and diversify more than those for positive concepts

Valence-dependent mutation in lexical evolution. Joshua Conrad Jackson, Kristen Lindquist, Ryan Drabble, Quentin Atkinson & Joseph Watts. Nature Human Behaviour, Nov 28 2022. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-022-01483-8

Abstract: A central goal of linguistics is to understand how words evolve. Past research has found that macro-level factors such as frequency of word usage and population size explain the pace of lexical evolution. Here we focus on cognitive and affective factors, testing whether valence (positivity–negativity) explains lexical evolution rates. Using estimates of cognate replacement rates for 200 concepts on an Indo-European language tree spanning six to ten millennia, we find that negative valence correlates with faster cognate replacement. This association holds when controlling for frequency of use, and follow-up analyses show that it is most robust for adjectives (‘dirty’ versus ‘clean’; ‘bad’ versus ‘good’); it does not consistently reach statistical significance for verbs, and never reaches significance for nouns. We also present experiments showing that individuals are more likely to replace words for negative versus positive concepts. Our findings suggest that emotional valence affects micro-level guided variation, which drives macro-level valence-dependent mutation in adjectives.

Null effects of news exposure: a test of the (un)desirable effects of a ‘news vacation’ and ‘news binging’

Null effects of news exposure: a test of the (un)desirable effects of a ‘news vacation’ and ‘news binging.’ Magdalena Wojcieszak, Bernhard Clemm von Hohenberg, Andreu Casas, Ericka Menchen-Trevino, Sjifra de Leeuw, Alexandre Gonçalves & Miriam Boon. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications volume 9, Article number: 413 (2022). Nov 18 2022. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-022-01423-x

Abstract: Democratic theorists and the public emphasize the centrality of news media to a well-functioning society. Yet, there are reasons to believe that news exposure can have a range of largely overlooked detrimental effects. This preregistered project examines news exposure effects on desirable outcomes, i.e., political knowledge, participation, and support for compromise, and detrimental outcomes, i.e., attitude and affective polarization, negative system perceptions, and worsened individual well-being. We rely on two complementary over-time experiments that combine participants’ survey self-reports and their behavioral browsing data: one that incentivized participants to take a ’news vacation’ for a week (N = 803; 6M visits) in the US, the other to ‘news binge’ for 2 weeks (N = 939; 4M visits) in Poland. Across both experiments, we demonstrate that reducing or increasing news exposure has no impact on the positive or negative outcomes tested. These null effects emerge irrespective of participants’ prior levels of news consumption and whether prior news diet was like-minded, and regardless of compliance levels. We argue that these findings reflect the reality of limited news exposure in the real world, with news exposure comprising on average roughly 3% of citizens’ online information diet.

Discussion

Most scholars agree that news exposure is normatively desirable. In this project, we aimed to provide a new perspective on the role of news media in society. We argued that tuning in to news can generate a wide range of adverse outcomes, polarizing attitudes, exacerbating out-party hostility, worsening perceptions of the political system, or making people more anxious or angry. We tested these potential pitfalls in concert with three beneficial outcomes, i.e., political knowledge, political participation, and support for inter-party compromise.

Across two experimental designs combining participants’ survey and behavioral browsing data in two distinct countries, prolonged decreases or increases in news consumption had no effects on the positive or negative individual-level outcomes. Two exceptions to this null pattern emerged: increasing news intake made the Polish participants feel warmer toward the out-party and decreasing news use led the American participants to see the system as less polarized. Because these effects are not very robust, we caution against putting too much weight on these results. These largely null patterns did not depend on whether people more clearly complied with the treatments, assessed using self-reported as well as behavioral measures based on online traces, and also accounting for whether participants visited hard news and/or saw political content outside news during the treatment. Similarly, although we used both self-reported and behavioral indicators of prior levels of news consumption and its ideological congeniality, news effects did not depend on an individual’s typical news diet. That is, the decrease in news use was not less impactful for avid news consumers or the increase in news use did not affect those rarely exposed to the news. The one exception—those whose prior news diet was ideologically congenial became less knowledgeable about current events when consuming more news – is small in magnitude. Testing our hypotheses in two distinct contexts assures that the results are not due to idiosyncrasies of any particular media or party system alone.

Although we offer a comprehensive examination of various individual-level effects of news exposure, these null effects are not precise estimates of population average treatment effects because our samples are not perfect cross-sections of the populations. This limitation is common to most work relying on data from online samples willing to share their behavioral traces, in that no such work can claim representativeness. More importantly, we note a few considerations regarding compliance. Our participants complied with the experimental treatments, apart from the subjects in Poland who did not self-report greater news consumption (perhaps due to the aforementioned biases in self-reports). These shifts, however, were small in magnitude, as indicated in the variations in behaviorally tracked exposures to online news and in the US subjects’ self-reports of overall news diet on the post-survey. There are no established theoretical and empirical benchmarks for determining when exactly news exposure should influence individual attitudes, cognitions, or behaviors, and how large the shifts in exposure need to be to notice these effects. Research that systematically varies the amounts of news in people’s media diets is needed to identify such minimal thresholds. In our project, the detected increases or decreases were likely insufficient to generate noticeable impacts on the tested outcomes.

In addition, the participants were instructed to increase or decrease their news consumption overall, not only online. While our trace data can ascertain desktop visits to (congenial) news websites for behavioral compliance and prior exposure measures, parallel behavioral indicators of these exposures on mobile and offline are missing. For most people, television remains the dominant news source (Allen et al., 2020) and we do not have behavioral data on these exposures occurring offline. Again, the self-reported measures that did ask about news use across devices and modalities (e.g., television, radio, mobile, social media, and so forth) have known limitations, and so the totality of changes in news exposures cannot be reliably determined. If the participants did not comply with our treatments on sources from which we could not collect behavioral data and did not accurately report compliance, the effects of the detected changes in online news consumption may have been minimized, leading to the null effects observed.

In a similar vein, although we do account for visits to social media pages of news organizations on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, we cannot get at news people encounter elsewhere on social media (e.g., friends’ posts, headlines, or embedded news videos). Instead, we capture a more direct engagement with news (i.e., landing on the URL of a news domain or a social media news page). It is thus possible that No News study participants nevertheless encountered news inadvertently when going to social media for other purposes. These encounters may have counteracted the effects of the US participants avoiding news in other contexts. At the same time, we note that most people do not come across news and public affairs information on social media platforms. Online behavioral data suggest that only 4% of News Feed on Facebook are news (Zuckerberg, 2018) and public affairs comprise 1.8% of the average News Feed of college students (Wells and Thorson, 2017, see also Karnowski et al., 2017; Vermeer et al., 2020). In our data, although social media browsing from Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube made up 7.7% of all visits during the overall study in the US and Poland, only 0.4% of those visits were to the identified news organizations, and these made up only 1.2% of all news visits overall. It is thus unlikely that social media exposure to the news would bias our effects in any meaningful way. That said, exposure to political memes or friends’ posts about current events also carries political information that can have effects above and beyond any news exposure, as we also note below. In order to test the prevalence and the effects of such encounters with politics, scholars should dedicate (and ideally pull) resources to developing tracking and data donation tools that work across devices and platforms.

Furthermore, (news) media effects depend on a host of factors, and various personal, content- or medium-level characteristics likely moderate the effects. Our pre-registered models accounted for prior levels of news exposure and our exploratory analyses additionally tested education and ideology as moderators, yet other socio-demographics (Yang and Grabe, 2011), the medium itself (e.g., newspapers, television, or internet; Althaus and Tewksbury, 2002), different digital outlets (e.g., online news sites, blogs, or online video sites, Dimitrova et al., 2014), and/or the mode of consumption (e.g., on apps or mobile Ohme, 2020) may also matter to whether, when, and for whom (news) media exposure has effects. Instead, our approach incentivized shifts in news consumption across devices, outlets, and modalities, potentially obscuring some nuances and contingencies.

These considerations aside, our results challenge the popular narrative that news media contribute to a healthy citizenry. These results also counter our expectations that news use should have a range of adverse effects. We speculate about three reasons for these patterns. In the current polarized climate in many countries, when citizens’ political identities are constantly activated (Settle, 2018) and when numerous ostensibly non-political issues and events become associated with politics (DellaPosta, 2020), it may be increasingly difficult to shift individual opinions and beliefs. Feelings toward out-groups, political elites, and the system at large may be too deeply ingrained in citizens’ overarching social and political identities (Mason, 2018) to be noticeably affected by (again minor) increases or decreases in one’s news consumption.

Second, despite the long-standing theoretical centrality of news, sizable proportions of the American and international public see news as complex or boring, are averse to partisan politics (Klar et al., 2018), and avoid news (Newman, 2019). As such, news accounts for only a small part of citizens’ overall information and communication ecology and is overshadowed by sports, entertainment, socializing, among other content categories that are not related to politics. Online, only between 2% (Wojcieszak et al., 2021) and 7–9% (Guess et al., 2021) of all URLs visited by large samples of Americans are news domains (Stier et al., 2022), and news comprised around 14% of total daily media diets when additionally accounting for mobile and television (Allen et al., 2020). In our trace data, visits to news sites comprised 3.01% of the overall browsing. Given that citizens’ time and attention are not consumed by current affairs and their attitudes, cognitions, and behaviors are also shaped by other factors (e.g., family, community context), whatever shifts in the very low baselines would have to be massive in strength or duration and/or small increases in news use would have to have a massive influence on the tested outcomes.

Third, today’s hybrid media environment may require a reconsideration of what is news, how to define and measure it, and how to identify the sources, contents, or textual and visual messages that can be considered news (or at least fulfill the democratic role of news). Our project did not define news consumption for the participants and—when measuring it behaviorally—narrowly focused on domain-level conceptualization (e.g., visiting cnn.com or foxnews.com). However, news sites feature not only hard news but also non-political content, so users may indeed visit “news" domains but only to read about sports, weather, or food recipes, not about politics. Others, in contrast, may visit political websites, not on our list (e.g., blogs) and/or go to ostensibly non-political outlets to read about politics (e.g., an article about abortion in Women’s Health), and learn about public affairs from such sources and contents. In our exploratory analyses relying on the classification of titles as related to politics, we accounted for the fact that citizens may conceptualize news in different ways and see each of the above scenarios as ”news” exposure. Yet even after accounting for these political contents within and outside news domains, the null effects remained unchanged. Nevertheless, myriad other sources and media messages may be seen as news or having news value by audiences (e.g., a celebrity tweeting about the U.S. Supreme Court overturning Roe vs. Wade abortion; see Edgerly, 2017; Edgerly and Vraga, 2019 for key evidence). To the extent that these distinct outlooks on what is news shape what sources audiences use, how they process information, and what they learn, scholars may need to expand their understanding and definitions when theorizing and studying news use and its democratic effects, positive and adverse.

Naturally, news media are important. They keep other powers in check by investigating and publicizing the truth and bind citizens together around shared events, values, or concerns (Dayan and Katz, 1992; Delli Carpini and Keeter, 1996; de Tocqueville, 2000), a function that is proving increasingly difficult in the fragmented media environment. In fact, much democratic theorizing concerns these macro-level effects of news media on society and democracy at large, effects that are challenging to study using social scientific methods. In addition, news media may play a paramount role in the gradual development of attitudes and participatory habits during political socialization (Moeller and de Vreese, 2019) and have a cumulative influence on people’s perceptions of (political) reality over the years (Gerbner, 1998), subtle effects that can only be tested with longitudinal designs that collect data over much longer periods. Nevertheless, this project, the first to rely on incentivized over-time designs in naturalistic settings and using both self-reported and online behavioral indicators of general news exposure across two countries, suggests that direct individual-level contributions of news media may be more limited than typically hoped or assumed.

Losing the sense of smell: Contrary to predictions, anosmics were better at remembering odor words, and rated odor and taste words more positively than control participants

Losing the sense of smell does not disrupt processing of odor words. Laura J. Speed et al. Brain and Language, Volume 235, December 2022, 105200. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bandl.2022.105200

Highlights

• Anosmics and controls do not differ in their comprehension of odor words.

• Anosmics remembered more odor words than controls.

• Anosmics rated odor words as more positively valenced than controls.

Abstract: Whether language is grounded in action and perception has been a key question in cognitive science, yet little attention has been given to the sense of smell. We directly test whether smell is necessary for comprehension of odor language, by comparing language processing in a group of participants with no sense of smell (anosmics) to a group of control participants. We found no evidence for a difference in online comprehension of odor and taste language between anosmics and controls using a lexical decision task and a semantic similarity judgment task, suggesting olfaction is not critical to the comprehension of odor language. Contrary to predictions, anosmics were better at remembering odor words, and rated odor and taste words as more positively valenced than control participants. This study finds no detriment to odor language after losing the sense of smell, supporting the proposal that odor language is not grounded in odor perception.

Keywords: Mental simulationEmbodimentAnosmiaOlfaction

4. Discussion

We investigated the online processing of olfactory language in a large group of individuals with acquired anosmia. Following proposals that odor language is grounded in olfactory representations (González et al., 2006), we predicted participants with anosmia would be impaired in processing odor language compared to controls. However, we found no difference in lexical decision performance for odor and taste words in anosmics compared to controls, and no detriment in semantic similarity judgments for odor and taste words in anosmics compared to controls. We find no evidence that odor representations play a critical role in the comprehension of odor language. Although odor representations may be activated during explicit imagination or expectation tasks (Zhou et al., 2019), our results do not support the proposal that odor simulation is involved in odor language comprehension (Speed and Majid, 2018, Speed and Majid, 2019).

We also predicted anosmics would remember fewer odor and taste words than control participants. On the contrary, we found anosmics remembered more odor words. This suggests losing the sense of smell is not detrimental to odor language processing. The puzzling aspect here is that we find the opposite pattern to the one predicted. It is possible that odor words are more salient to anosmics because they are aware these words are related to the perceptual sense they have lost. In particular, we recruited participants via two anosmia charities, whose members likely attach more importance to the sense of smell and their loss. Reading odor words may have left an emotional trace for these participants. fMRI studies with patients with acquired anosmia have shown extensive activation in higher-order olfactory regions of the brain in anticipation of odor words, suggesting increased effort or attention (Han et al., 2019, Joshi et al., 2020). Such an explanation is also compatible with the better memory for odor words we found: anosmics may have effortfully processed odor words, simultaneously strengthening memory traces. On the other hand, the lack of difference in lexical decision response time to odor words between anosmics and controls suggests an explanation in terms of processing effort is unlikely.

There are other possibilities to consider. Perhaps the anosmic participants were more motivated to perform the study than the control participants who we recruited via Prolific Academic. This could be tested in the future by replicating the study in a lab environment where motivation may be better equated. Whilst we agree there are limitations with collecting control data from participants online, there are also some benefits. It has been shown, for example, that participants recruited online are more diverse than typical university samples (Burhmester, Kwang, & Gosling, 2011), and therefore may be a better comparison for the group of anosmic participants. Furthermore, research has shown that a number of classic psycholinguistic effects involving small differences in reaction time have been replicated with data collected online, and there are negligible differences in the quality of data between online studies and studies in the lab (Enochson, Culbertson, & Eriksson, 2015, Germine, Nakayama, Chabris, Chatterjee, & Wilmer, 2012). We are therefore confident in the quality of the control data we collected. Another factor to consider is that we followed our preregistered hypotheses and analyses, and did not correct for multiple comparisons when following up significant interaction and main effects (see Rothman, 1990). If we did apply a more conservative significance criterion, the difference in word recall and valence ratings between anosmics and controls for odor words would no longer be significant, whilst the difference in valence between anosmics and controls for taste words would remain. Future research should therefore aim to replicate such an effect.

It has been suggested that if odor simulation is unavailable during language comprehension, emotional simulation may become relevant for odor language (Speed & Majid, 2019). Our emotional ratings provide first support for this idea. Odor and taste words had more positive valence associations for anosmics than controls, but this was not the case for vision words. It is possible, then, that anosmics rely more strongly on emotional associations for odor-relevant words since they can no longer rely on odor experience. It is also possible, however, that odor and taste words are rated as more positive because the anosmics are aware their experience of the word referent is limited after losing their sense of smell. The words could be emotional because individuals know what they have lost. Another possibility is that in the absence of odor simulation, participants rely more heavily on linguistic co-occurrences (see, e.g., Connell, 2019, Reilly et al., 2021). For example, it has been shown that odor-related words occur in more emotional parts of the English lexicon than vision-related words (Winter, 2016). Anosmics may rely on the emotional content of odor-word neighbors to support word meaning. A similar argument has been made in the context of blind language processing and is a matter of on-going debate (Kim et al., 2019a, Kim et al., 2019b, Lewis et al., 2019, Ostarek et al., 2019).

The present investigation was limited to acquired anosmics, i.e., individuals who have previously been able to smell, and are likely to still possess memories and semantic associations to odors. So, in principle, these anosmics could mentally simulate odor via memory traces of previous olfactory experience, although it has been shown that acquired anosmics have weaker olfactory imagery than control participants (Flohr et al., 2014), suggesting this is unlikely. To shed more light on the issue, the same study could be repeated with individuals who have congenital smell loss (i.e., people born without a sense of smell). Moreover, due to the online nature of the study, we were unable to conduct any physical testing of olfactory ability which could provide additional validation of the anosmic group. We also note the inherent difficulty in drawing conclusions based on null results. An obvious question is whether we had adequate statistical power to detect effects. In terms of sample size, we have twice as many participants as previous studies that have observed action language processing deficits in individuals with Parkinson’s disease (Fernandino et al., 2013b, Fernandino et al., 2013a). In addition, such studies performed statistical analyses by participants only, whilst we used linear mixed effects models that take into account both participant- and item-level variance, and are therefore more powerful (Brysbaert & Stevens, 2018). At a minimum this suggests even if there are simulation effects they are incredibly small in size. It is possible, however, there are other contexts in which odor simulation is more relevant, such as when reading a menu or recipe. Critically, while there is no indication of impairment in odor language processing in anosmics, in some tasks the effects were even in the opposite direction to predictions (e.g., word recall, emotional valence).

It could be argued the tasks used in the present study were semantically shallow, meaning they could easily be completed without necessarily activating semantic information. However, previous studies using a lexical decision task have found that patients with Parkinson’s disease are impaired comprehending action verbs compared to controls (Fernandino et al., 2013a). Furthermore, Reilly et al. (2021) did not find a difference between their anosmic patient and a group of controls in the narration of an olfactory event, which presumably requires deep semantic processing, lending further credence to our conclusions.

Taken together with previous studies of participants with an intact sense of smell (Pomp et al., 2018, Speed and Majid, 2018), as well as studies with anosmic patients (Han et al., 2019, Joshi et al., 2020, Reilly et al., 2021), the evidence so far does not support the proposal that mental simulation of odor occurs during odor language processing. The existing findings suggest the connection between language and olfaction is symmetric, with equally weak connections (for English speakers) between language and olfactory areas in comprehension as production (Majid, 2021, Speed and Majid, 2018). Instead, the evidence suggests odor language may involve high-level representations, such as hedonic information (Pomp et al., 2018, Speed and Majid, 2018). This contrasts with other behavioral paradigms that suggest single words can activate sensory odor information. Olofsson et al. (2012), for example, found responses to odors were facilitated after participants were presented with matching labels, suggesting labels activate odor templates. In their study, however, participants were familiarized with the odors and their labels first, and then presented with the same odor four times in the experimental trials. It is possible, then, that a label can activate an odor representation via short-term odor memory with repetition, but in everyday language processing olfactory activation is not automatic. This requires further exploration.

To conclude, we provide evidence suggesting that odor language is comprehended using high-level odor representations, rather than low-level simulations of odor. Embodied theories of language processing should be fine-tuned to account for differences in mental simulation across the sensory modalities.

Gender differences in cooperation across 20 societies: Overall, our findings revealed little-to-no evidence for an association between gender and cooperation

Gender differences in cooperation across 20 societies: a meta-analysis. Giuliana Spadaro, Shuxian Jin and Daniel Balliet. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. November 28 2022. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2021.0438

Abstract: Past research hypothesized that men and women differ in their tendency to cooperate with strangers in situations that involve a conflict of interests. However, recent empirical research has provided converging evidence that men and women cooperate to a similar extent, and that differences in cooperation can emerge in response to specific situational and societal contexts. Here we analyse six decades of empirical research on human cooperation using social dilemmas (1961–2017, k = 126) conducted across 20 industrialized societies, testing pre-registered hypotheses derived from evolutionary theory and social role theory. Overall, our findings revealed little-to-no evidence for an association between gender and cooperation using different meta-analytic approaches. We did not find within-study differences in cooperation between men and women (d = 0.011, 95% CI [−0.038, 0.060]). However, cooperation was slightly higher across studies with predominantly female samples (k = 972). In addition, contrary to our predictions, gender differences in cooperation did not emerge in response to the degree of conflicting interests in the situation, and societal levels of gender equality and economic development. We discuss the implications of these findings for our understanding of gender differences in cooperation.

4. Discussion

This meta-analysis examined empirical studies on cooperation using social dilemma paradigms to answer questions about the relationship between participants' gender and cooperative behaviour. Specifically, we tested whether women are overall more cooperative than men, and novel pre-registered hypotheses about the moderating role of contextual factors such as the degree of conflict in the situation, and societal adherence to canonical gender roles and economic development. Overall, we found little-to-no evidence for gender differences in cooperation and no support for the additional moderation hypotheses. Below, we discuss these findings, their limitations, and suggest some potential directions for future research.

In line with previous meta-analytic evidence [12], we found no within-study differences in cooperation between men and women. Men and women displayed comparable levels of cooperation in Prisoner's Dilemmas, public goods dilemmas and resource dilemma games (k = 126, d = 0.011). However, we did find a significant association between overall gender composition of the sample and the mean levels of cooperation across 972 studies. This result suggests that there is higher cooperation in studies with a higher prevalence of women. Although this latter analysis benefits from a large number of studies, societies, and experimental settings, we should interpret these findings with caution based on (a) potential methodological confounds related to changes in samples over time, and (b) conflict with existing evidence. In fact, over the last 60 years, cooperation in studies using economic games has increased over time [46], and so did the inclusion of women in the experimental samples [47]. In our data, year of data collection is both positively correlated with logit-transformed cooperation rates (r = 0.17, p < 0.001) and negatively associated with proportion of men in the sample (r = −0.27, p < 0.001). Although the association of gender composition of the sample and cooperation remains significant while controlling for year of data collection (b = −0.286, p = 0.002), we could not rule out that temporal trends in methodologies could account for the observed significant association. In addition, this analysis does not replicate the result of a similar analysis using a broader set of studies (N = 1527) and that controls for a greater number of study characteristics (e.g. mean age of the sample, discipline of study, symmetry, deception) [19]. Considering these concerns, we conclude that we do not find compelling evidence in support of gender differences in cooperation.

We further tested whether women cooperate more than men in situations involving greater conflict of interests. The findings did not provide support for this prediction, either examining whether the degree of conflict (i) moderated within-studies gender differences in cooperation or (ii) interacted with gender composition of the sample to predict mean levels of cooperation across studies. Given that situations with higher conflict of interests involve more risk of exploitation, these null findings can also inform research investigating whether gender differences in cooperation relate to gender-specific attitudes toward risks [5,34,48]. The severity of conflict in the meta-analysis was operationalized using the payoff structure (i.e. the K index, [32]) of games that afford the potential for exploitation [30]. Although this approach had the advantage of evaluating the moderation of conflict within situations that had a similar incentive structure, the studies included in the meta-analysis presented little variation in the K index. In fact, the K index ranged from 0.20 to 0.40 for 46% of the studies (M = 0.46, Mdn = 0.40, s.d. = 0.21). Although this is in line with what is observed across all studies in CoDa (e.g. 39% ranging between 0.20 and 0.40, [49]), variation within the K index might be too small to detect any differential responses to stress or emergence of canonical gender roles to result in gender differences in cooperative responses. An alternative way to test this hypothesis could be to examine gender differences in cooperative behaviour across game situations with weak or strong exploitation components (e.g. as done in [31] by comparing behaviour in a ultimatum game and a Prisoner's Dilemma). In addition, the type of conflict of interests faced in situations resembling a Prisoner's Dilemma structure might only be a small fraction of the situations experienced in daily life [50], and Prisoner's Dilemma situations might provide situational cues of the potential of exploitation that could affect the occurrence of gender-typical behaviour [27]. A promising avenue for future research might be then to examine cooperative behaviour by systematically varying other relevant situational features, such as introducing the possibility to benefit others through one's competitive behaviour (e.g. socially oriented incentives, [51]) and the information about the interaction partner (e.g. anonymity, [5]). The identification of additional contextual features can contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of the mixed patterns of findings on gender differences in cooperation.

In addition, in the present meta-analysis, gender differences in cooperation did not vary across societies. This evidence is in line with studies showing little evidence for cross-cultural variation of gender differences in prosocial behaviour in children from both industrialized and small-scale societies [52]. Here, studies conducted in societies at different levels of gender equality and economic development displayed very similar cooperation by men and women. Although differences would be expected in light of social role theory [13,27], these findings are in line with recent empirical evidence showing that gender inequality was not associated with differences in magnitude of gender differences in cooperative behaviour in a Prisoner's Dilemma in 10 countries [5]. Compared to Dorrough & Glöckner's study [5], our meta-analysis included a broader range of countries and societal indicators, such as ratio of female to male labour force participation rates [39] and the number of years since women's suffrage [40]. However, none of these seven indicators was significantly correlated to mean differences in cooperation across studies (p-values ≥ 0.292). These findings are consistent with recent meta-analytic work showing no evidence for cross-cultural variation in cooperation more broadly [53]. It is worth mentioning, however, that despite our effort to obtain more studies (e.g. through direct requests to authors), findings from more recent cross-cultural studies detecting gender differences in cooperation could not be included, since these studies were not yet annotated in CoDa (e.g. [4,5]). As such, our meta-analysis has low statistical power to detect variation across societies, due to the limited number of effects available for each society. Moreover, the included studies mostly comprised WEIRD samples [54] and might not be representative of the actual cross-cultural variation in cooperative behaviour. For a more comprehensive analysis, we encourage future work to more systematically disclose information about cooperation displayed by men and women, or to provide this information retrospectively for previously published studies (e.g. through CoDa [35]). At present, however, these limitations might impact the reliability of variance observed at the highest level of the model. More research is needed to replicate our findings with a broader set of societies and observations.

Last, we tested whether other features of the interaction context moderated gender differences in cooperation to provide a conceptual replication of findings from previous meta-analytic work [12]. We did replicate that gender is not associated with cooperation and that group size and year of data collection do not significantly moderate the gender effects after controlling for several study characteristics. However, we found no support for the moderation hypotheses related to gender composition of the group, group size, iterations, and year of data collection, as none of these variables were significantly associated with the magnitude of gender differences in cooperation. These different patterns of findings might be due to the way primary studies have been selected in the present work, namely the inclusion of more recent studies (2010–2017, k = 37), and the adoption of stricter inclusion criteria (e.g. matrix games not classifiable as Prisoner's Dilemma and public goods games were not included, and so did studies involving interactions among acquaintances). It is worth noting that our goal was not to perform an exact replication of previous work. Nevertheless, the conceptual replication of the main effect provides even stronger evidence that there is no main overall association between gender and cooperation. Furthermore, the lack of moderation of the association between gender and cooperation suggests that these moderation effects are not very robust to variations in the data selection and analytic techniques—and so should be interpreted with caution. The fact that the moderating effects were not robust to these adjustments suggest that even small variations of the context can be crucial to elicit (or not) gender differences in cooperation. For example, the present meta-analysis included additional studies from more recent years, and there have been changes in samples and methods in the literature over time, such as more recent studies having (a) a greater percentage of women, (b) fewer student samples, and (c) a stronger conflict of interests (i.e. lower K value) [47]. Future studies might consider to experimentally manipulate the situational features of interest, such as gender composition of the group (e.g. [55]) and conflict of interests (e.g. [56]), to provide a further test of these moderating hypotheses.

Analysis of 48 countries in the 2000–2018 PISA tests: Mainly positive Flynn effects in economically less developed countries, negative Flynn effects in the economically most advanced countries

Ongoing trends of human intelligence. Gerhard Meisenberg, Richard Lynn. Intelligence, Volume 96, January–February 2023, 101708. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2022.101708

Abstract: The aim of the study is to estimate the most recent trends of intelligence world-wide. We find that the most recent studies report mainly positive Flynn effects in economically less developed countries, but trivial and frequently negative Flynn effects in the economically most advanced countries. This is confirmed by an analysis of 48 countries in the 2000–2018 PISA tests, showing that high pre-existing IQ and school achievement are the best predictors of declining test scores. IQ gaps between countries are still large (e.g., 19 IQ points in PISA between East Asia and South Asia) but are diminishing world-wide. We predict that these trends, observed in adolescents today, will reduce cognitive gaps between the working-age populations of countries and world regions during coming decades. As is predicted by the well-established relationship between intelligence and economic growth, there is already evidence that the ongoing cognitive convergence is paralleled by global economic convergence. These developments raise questions as to how long this cognitive and economic convergence will continue, whether it will eliminate cognitive and economic gaps between countries entirely, and whether a condition with high levels of cognitive ability and economic prosperity is sustainable long-term.

Introduction

The last century has seen two developments in intelligence research that are sufficiently profound to be called “scientific revolutions” (Kuhn, 1962): the importance of genetics for individual differences, and the discovery that intelligence changes on the historical time scale, with major rises of intelligence having taken place during the 20th century. Jim Flynn's work was at the center of the second of these scientific revolutions. Scattered reports about rising intelligence had appeared since the 1930s (Lynn, 2013), but the pervasive nature of secular intelligence gains was not recognized until Flynn's work during the 1980s, when he showed rising IQ in the United States and world-wide (Flynn, 1984, Flynn, 1987).

Flynn did not fully grasp the significance of his findings at once. In his 1987 paper (p. 187), he concluded: “The Ravens Progressive Matrices Test does not measure intelligence but rather a correlate with a weak causal link to intelligence; the same may apply to all IQ tests.” Elsewhere he asks: “Why aren't we undergoing a renaissance unparalleled in human history? …why aren't we duplicating the golden days of Athens or the Italian Renaissance?” (Holloway, 1999). At that time, Flynn did not believe that “real” intelligence could have risen so much. Only later did he fully acknowledge the reality and importance of rising intelligence, for the functioning of a modern economy and even for the moral progress he saw during the 20th century (Flynn, 2013, Flynn, 2014).

Two major meta-analyses have confirmed the ubiquity of test score gains (Pietschnig & Voracek, 2015; Trahan, Stuebing, Fletcher, & Hiscock, 2014). We also know that the Flynn effect is not strongest on the most g-loaded tests (te Nijenhuis, 2013; te Nijenhuis & Van Der Flier, 2013). This suggests that the causal factors that determine individual differences in intelligence, and thereby the correlations between its cognitive components, are different from the factors that have changed the intelligence levels of entire populations over time. It has been claimed that, with proper controls included, the Flynn effect has been stronger on tests requiring more “abstract” thinking (Armstrong et al., 2016; Must, Must, & Mikk, 2016). More generally, gains on fluid intelligence have been stronger than gains on crystallized intelligence, at least in most of the times and places for which we have informative data. Some abilities included in the g nexus did not show any evidence of Flynn effects, including reaction time (e.g., Nettelbeck & Wilson, 2004), digit span (Gignac, 2015; Woodley of Menie & Fernandes, 2015), and ability-based emotional intelligence (Pietschnig & Gittler, 2017).

There is general agreement that the Flynn effect, and perhaps also its reversal in some countries, is caused by environmental changes rather than genetics (Bratsberg & Rogeberg, 2018). Schooling is a likely candidate considering that the educational level of the population has risen massively over time (Schofer & Meyer, 2005) and that each year of additional school attendance during adolescence raises the IQ by 1–5 points (Ritchie & Tucker-Drob, 2018); and like the Flynn effect, schooling gains are not on g, but on specialized cognitive skills (Ritchie, Bates, & Deary, 2015). Improved nutrition is another likely contributor to Flynn effects (Lynn, 1990).

Intelligence is important for human societies. Weede and Kämpf (2002) were the first to present evidence that the rate of economic growth is predicted mainly by two variables: initial per capita GDP, and average intelligence of the population. Low initial per capita GDP and high intelligence is the combination that favors rapid economic growth. This key finding has been confirmed in multiple further studies (e.g., Francis & Kirkegaard, 2022; Jones & Schneider, 2006; Meisenberg, 2012, Meisenberg, 2014a). It implies that in the short term, countries gravitate towards a level of prosperity that is commensurate with their level of intelligence. On longer time scales, this observation predicts that countries with rising intelligence become richer while those with declining intelligence become poorer.

Combining these findings with the earlier conclusion that the Flynn effect is caused by environmental improvements associated with economic development, such as high-intensity educational systems and the elimination of childhood malnutrition, we can conclude that since the industrial revolution, economic development and the Flynn effect have reinforced each other in an upward spiral, a positive feedback that has created modern industrial society (Meisenberg, 2014a, Meisenberg, 2014b). It implies that the maintenance of high intelligence is a requirement for the maintenance of well-functioning and prosperous societies. It is this theory which motivates our investigations into the current and projected future trajectories of human intelligence in the countries of the world. The importance of this research is underscored by recent reports about the end of the Flynn effect, and even its reversal, especially in several European countries (Dutton, van der Linden, & Lynn, 2016). In the present study, we investigate which countries of the world still have positive Flynn effects, and where intelligence is stagnating or declining.

The invention of phonetic writing seems to have started in many places with the notation of proper names, while the notation of whole sentences lagged behind

Morin, Olivier. 2022. “The Piecemeal Evolution of Writing.” SocArXiv. November 25. doi:10.31235/osf.io/a6ket

Abstract: This paper argues that writing evolved gradually and in piecemeal fashion. Literacy as we know and use it is made up of at least three distinct features: it is a glottography (a notation of language), it is a generalist code that can note down anything we can say, and it is a form of asynchronous communication—a way of conveying information to other people across space and across time. This combination of features is uniquely powerful; but this does not mean the three features evolved together, or for the same reasons. Glottography, generality, and asynchronous use evolved out of pace with one another. Two huge lags separate, first, the invention of glottography from its generalisation beyond proper names, second, the existence of writing as a generalist tool from the routinisation of its asynchronous use. At each step the inventors of writing responded to distinct and specific pressures. The originators of glottography were not necessarily aware of their invention’s potential beyond the notation of proper names. Those who developed writing into a generalist tool, capable of encoding anything that can be said, were unlikely to anticipate that the code they were using as an accompaniment to oral recitations, or as a reminder of the transactions they took part in, would come to be used in a quite different way¬—to store information for the benefit of distant recipients to whom the information would be new.

Shy People Also Get Enhanced Mood After a Getting-Acquainted Interaction with a Stranger

Enhanced Mood After a Getting-Acquainted Interaction with a Stranger: Do Shy People Benefit Too? Susan Sprecher et al. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, November 25, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1177/02654075221141433

Abstract: People report positive moods and enhanced well-being when they socialize with friends and other close ties. However, because most people routinely have more encounters with acquaintances and strangers (social connections known as weak ties) than with close friends or kin (strong ties), we deemed it important to examine whether interaction with weak ties also enhances happiness and well-being. This investigation, which analyzed data from two laboratory procedures, examined whether participants’ positive affect (PA) increased and negative affect (NA) decreased, from before to after a getting-acquainted interaction with a stranger. We also considered whether any benefits of the interaction were moderated by the participants’ level of shyness. Participants (N = 270; 135 dyads) from a U.S. university completed mood indices before and after a getting-acquainted task. Their PA significantly increased and their NA significantly decreased from before to after the interaction. Shy participants experienced greater NA both before and after the getting-acquainted interaction (relative to less shy participants), but the shyness level of our participants did not moderate the pattern of change in their PA and NA. Shy participants experienced increases in PA and decreases in NA that were similar to those of less shy participants. We discuss implications of the results regarding the important role of weak social connections for increasing one’s daily mood, including for those who are shy.

The strength of party identification has remained remarkably constant over the decades

Partisan Stability During Turbulent Times: Evidence from Three American Panel Surveys. Donald P. Green & Paul Platzman. Political Behavior, Nov 25 2022. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11109-022-09825-y

Abstract: The past decade has witnessed profound changes in the tenor of American party politics. These changes, in tandem with growing affective polarization and residential segregation by party, raise the question of whether party identification is itself changing. Using three multi-wave panel surveys that stretch from the first Obama Administration through the Trump Administration, this paper takes a fresh look at the stability of party identification, using several different statistical approaches to differentiate true partisan change from response error. Perhaps surprisingly, the pace of partisan change observed between 2011 and 2020 is quite similar to the apparent rates of change in panel surveys dating back to the 1950s. Few respondents experience appreciable change in party identification in the short run, but the pace at which partisanship changes implies that substantial changes are relatively common over a voter’s lifespan.

Conclusion

Although much has changed in American politics during the decades since the path-breaking 1956–1960 ANES panel survey, the stability of party identification during the Obama-Trump era looks very much as it did during the Eisenhower Administration or, for that matter, during the eras encompassing Vietnam, Watergate, Stagflation, the Iran Hostage Crisis, the Reagan Ascendancy, the Iran-Contra Scandal, and the Persian Gulf War (Green and Palmquist, 1994).

During the 2011–2020 period, raw correlations between party identification scores measured in successive waves of panel interviews tend to be quite high by comparison to most political attitudes. They are higher still when corrections are made for measurement error. Whether these corrections derive from instrumental variables regression or down-to-earth approaches such as index creation, disattenuated correlations imply that party identification changes at a glacial pace.

The same picture emerges from other ways of describing partisan change statistically. Individual-level response variation is relatively rare across panel waves, a pattern affirmed by other recent studies of multi-wave panel studies, most notably Tucker et al. (2019), who analyze twenty-waves of the TAPS panel from 2011 to 2016. They find that shocks at the individual level dissipate quickly; a shock that moves party identification 0.21 scale points in one wave has an effect of just 0.04 scale points 4 months later and just 0.01 eight months later. When we track individual-level partisan trajectories using all three panel datasets, we too find that a small portion of the public experiences durable change, even in turbulent political times. Nor do we see evidence of aggregate party change, whether we track panel respondents over time or examine independent cross-sectional surveys conducted by the Gallup Poll.

Looking back at the dominant theoretical perspectives that are used to explain change or stability in party identification, it seems that our results underscore the importance of deepening social divides. Our initial hypothesis was two-sided in the sense that the stabilizing effects of growing affective polarization and residential segregation could have been overshadowed by the destabilizing effects of changing party issue positions, the emergence of new issues that divide the parties, and new communication technologies that accentuate those divisions. The fact that party identification seems at least as stable now as it did when the parties were less ideologically distinctive and mercurial vindicates a central argument in Campbell et al. (1960), namely, that party attachment is not primarily driven by ideological affinity. We are quick to concede, however, that this conclusion is not rooted in a direct test of individual-level responsiveness to perceived party stances, a test that presents a host of methodological challenges when using non-experimental panel surveys (Lenz, 2012; Green and Palmquist, 1990).

Although stability over time remains a key feature of American party attachments, we conclude by calling attention to the crucial distinction between slow change and none at all. For those who study elections using cross-sectional survey data, the results presented here are reassuring insofar as they suggest that the pace at which partisanship changes is too slow to be consequential during a given election season. At the same time, the caricature of party identification as an “unmoved mover” creates a host of empirical anomalies that become apparent when researchers track partisan attachments over decades and find substantively large and sustained movements (cf. Kollman and Jackson 2021, Chapter 4). To be empirically sustainable, theoretical accounts must explain why party attachments resist change as well as why meaningful changes do occur over voters’ lifetimes.