Left-Wing Authoritarianism in the United States

Conway, L. G., Houck, S. C., Gornick, L. J. and Repke, M. A. (2017), Finding the Loch Ness Monster: Left-Wing Authoritarianism in the United States. Political Psychology. doi:10.1111/pops.12470

Abstract: Although past research suggests authoritarianism may be a uniquely right-wing phenomenon, the present two studies tested the hypothesis that authoritarianism exists in both right-wing and left-wing contexts in essentially equal degrees. Across two studies, university (n = 475) and Mechanical Turk (n = 298) participants completed either the RWA (right-wing authoritarianism) scale or a newly developed (and parallel) LWA (left-wing authoritarianism) scale. Participants further completed measurements of ideology and three domain-specific scales: prejudice, dogmatism, and attitude strength. Findings from both studies lend support to an authoritarianism symmetry hypothesis: Significant positive correlations emerged between LWA and measurements of liberalism, prejudice, dogmatism, and attitude strength. These results largely paralleled those correlating RWA with identical conservative-focused measurements, and an overall effect-size measurement showed LWA was similarly related to those constructs (compared to RWA) in both Study 1 and Study 2. Taken together, these studies provide evidence that LWA may be a viable construct in ordinary U.S. samples.

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                                       Left-Wing Authoritarianism (LWA) Scale

For the following questions, please answer on a 1–7 scale, where 1=“I disagree completely,” 4=“neutral/undecided,” and 7=“I completely agree.”
_______1. Our country desperately needs a mighty and liberal leader who will do what has to be done to destroy the radical traditional ways of doing things that are ruining us.
_______2. Christian fundamentalists are just as healthy and moral as anybody else.
_______3. It’s always better to trust the judgment of the proper authorities in science with respect to issues like global warming and evolution than to listen to the noisy rabblerousers in our society who are trying to create doubts in people’s minds.
_______4. Christian Fundamentalists and others who have rebelled against the established sciences are no doubt every bit as good and virtuous as those who agree with the best scientific minds.
_______5. The only way our country can get through the crisis ahead is to get rid of our “traditional” values, put some tough leaders in power who oppose those values, and silence the troublemakers spreading bad (and so-called “traditional”) ideas.
_______6. There is absolutely nothing wrong with Christian Fundamentalist camps designed to create a new generation of Fundamentalists.
_______7. Our country needs traditional thinkers who will have the courage to defy modern progressive movements, even if this upsets many people.
_______8. Our country will be destroyed someday if we do not smash the traditional beliefs eating away at our national fiber and growing progressive beliefs.
_______9. With respect to environmental issues, everyone should have their own personality, even if it makes them different from everyone else.
_______10. Progressive ways and liberal values show the best way of life.
_______11. You have to admire those who challenged the law and the majority’s view by protesting against abortion rights or in favor of reinstating school prayer.
_______12. What our country really needs is a strong, determined leader who will crush the evil of pushy Christian religious people, and take us forward to our true path.
_______13. Some of the best people in our country are those who are challenging our government, supporting religion, and ignoring the “normal way” things are supposed to be done.
_______14. We should strongly punish those who try to uphold what they claim are “God’s laws” about abortion, pornography, and marriage, when they break the actual laws of the country in order to do so.
_______15. There are many radical, immoral Christian people in our country today, who are trying to ruin it for their religious purposes, whom the authorities should put out of action.
_______16. A Christian’s place should be wherever he or she wants to be. The days when Christians are submissive to the conventions of this country belong strictly in the past.
_______17. Our country will be great if we honor the ways of progressive thinking, do what the best liberal authorities tell us to do, and get rid of the religious and conservative “rotten apples” who are ruining everything.
_______18. With respect to environmental issues, there is no “ONE right way” to live life; everybody has to create their own way.
_______19. Christian Fundamentalists should be praised for being brave enough to defy the current societal and legal norms.
_______20. This country would work a lot better if certain groups of Christian troublemakers would just shut up and accept their group’s proper place in society.

Drosophila M. males also significantly reduced courtship activity following a failed mating experience from old females but did not do so for control (large, young, virgin) or small females

Balaban-Feld J, Valone TJ. Changes in courtship behaviour following rejection: The influence of female phenotype in Drosophila melanogaster. Ethology. 2017;00:1–6. https://doi.org/10.1111/eth.12715

Abstract: Courtship can be costly and so selection should favour individual males that reduce courtship towards female types that have a low probability of resulting in copulation. One way males can do this is by associating previous courtship failure with the traits of particular rejecting females. We characterised changes in male Drosophila melanogaster courtship behaviour following a failed mating attempt with one of the four female phenotypes that varied in size, age or mating status. To do this, we assessed individual courtship behaviour for each male presented again with a female of the same phenotype that previously rejected him. Males reduced subsequent courtship most strongly for recently mated (sexually non-receptive) females. More interestingly, males also significantly reduced courtship activity following a failed mating experience from old females but did not do so for control (large, young, virgin) or small females. As such, males significantly reduced courtship towards both female types possessing chemical cues associated with their phenotype (age and mating status), but not towards a female phenotype based on physical characteristics (body size). Our results suggest that males are able to modify their courtship behaviour following experience, but that they are better prepared to associate chemical traits that may be more reliable indicators of the likelihood of courtship failure.

Despite claims to the contrary neither dogs, elephants, dolphins, magpies, horses, manta rays, squid, or ants have shown compelling, reproducible evidence for self-recognition in any modality

The “olfactory mirror” and other recent attempts to demonstrate self-recognition in non-primate species. Gordon G. Gallup Jr. Behavioural Processes, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.beproc.2017.12.010

Highlights
•    We review a recent attempt to develop an “olfactory mirror” test of self-recognition in domestic dogs.
•    We discuss the kind of data that are required to provide definitive evidence for self-recognition in dogs and other species.
•    Despite claims to the contrary no dogs, elephants, dolphins, magpies, horses, manta rays, squid, or ants have shown compelling, reproducible evidence for self-recognition in any modality.

Abstract: The recent attempt by Horowitz (2017) to develop an “olfactory mirror” test of self-recognition in domestic dogs raises some important questions about the kind of data that are required to provide definitive evidence for self-recognition in dogs and other species. We conclude that the “olfactory mirror” constitutes a compelling analog to the mark test for mirror self-recognition in primates, but despite claims to the contrary neither dogs, elephants, dolphins, magpies, horses, manta rays, squid, or ants have shown compelling, reproducible evidence for self-recognition in any modality.

Keywords: Olfactory self-recognition; Mirror self-recognition; Self-recognition in other modalities; Non-primate species

General sexual desire, but not desire for uncommitted sexual relationships, tracks changes in women's hormonal status

General sexual desire, but not desire for uncommitted sexual relationships, tracks changes in women's hormonal status. Benedict Jones et al. In bioRxiv, https://doi.org/10.1101/155788

Abstract: Several recent longitudinal studies have investigated the hormonal correlates of both young adult women's general sexual desire and, more specifically, their desire for uncommitted sexual relationships. Findings across these studies have been mixed, potentially because each study tested only small samples of women (Ns = 43, 33, and 14). Here we report results from a much larger (N = 375) longitudinal study of hormonal correlates of young adult women's general sexual desire and their desire for uncommitted sexual relationships. Our analyses suggest that within-woman changes in general sexual desire are negatively related to progesterone, but are not related to testosterone or cortisol. We observed some positive relationships for estradiol, but these were generally only significant for solitary sexual desire. By contrast with our results for general sexual desire, analyses showed no evidence that changes in women's desire for uncommitted sexual relationships are related to their hormonal status. Together, these results suggest that changes in hormonal status contribute to changes in women's general sexual desire, but do not influence women's desire for uncommitted sexual relationships.

When proficiency levels are only adequate, and without special investment in L2, native language jokes will be evaluated as funnier than foreign language jokes. With intermediate proficiency and investment, jokes can be experienced as similarly humorous in the two languages

Are jokes funnier in one’s native language? Ayşe Ayçiçeği-Dinn, Simge Şişman-Bal, Catherine L Caldwell-Harris. International Journal of Humor Research, https://doi.org/10.1515/humor-2017-0112

Abstract: Appreciating the humor in jokes involves incongruity-detection and resolution, which requires good language skills. Foreign language comprehension is challenging, including interpreting words within their sentence context. An implication is that jokes in a foreign language will be more difficult to understand and therefore probably less humorous, compared to native language jokes. To study this question while preserving humor across translations, jokes were selected from Turkish and English websites to minimize language play and cultural references. Turkish university students rated both Turkish and English jokes for humor. Humor for foreign language jokes was positively correlated with ease-of-understanding of specific jokes and also by the individual-differences characteristics of English proficiency and likely career investment (e.g., preparing for a future career as English teacher or translator). We propose the proficiency X investment theory: Foreign language jokes will be experienced as funnier than native language jokes when proficiency levels are high (ranging from good to excellent) and bilinguals have a high level of L2 investment. When proficiency levels are only adequate, and without special investment in L2, native language jokes will be evaluated as funnier than foreign language jokes. With intermediate proficiency and investment, jokes can be experienced as similarly humorous in the two language. Important in this pattern is the proposal that weaker L2-proficiency can trade-off with language investment to bolster L2 humor appreciation.

Keywords: humor appreciation; bilingualism; foreign language learning; Turkish students

Greater importance of intrasexual competition than female choice in human male sexual selection than we thought -- physical dominance, but not sexual attractiveness, predicted mating success

Kordsmeyer, Tobias, John Hunt, David Puts, Julia Ostner, and Lars Penke. 2017. “The Relative Importance of Intra- and Intersexual Selection on Human Male Sexually Dimorphic Traits"”. PsyArXiv. December 21. psyarxiv.com/edw4f

Abstract: Recent evidence suggests that in sexual selection on human males, intrasexual competition plays a larger role than female choice. In a sample of men (N = 164), we sought to provide further evidence on the effects of men’s physical dominance and sexual attractiveness on mating success and hence in sexual selection. Objective measures and subjective ratings of male sexually dimorphic traits purportedly under sexual selection (height, vocal and facial masculinity, upper body size from 3D scans, physical strength, and baseline testosterone) and observer perceptions of physical dominance and sexual attractiveness based on self-presentation video recordings were assessed and associated with mating success (sociosexual behaviour and number of potential conceptions) in a partly longitudinal design. Results from structural equation models and selection analyses revealed that physical dominance, but not sexual attractiveness, predicted mating success. Physical dominance mediated associations of upper body size, physical strength, as well as vocal and facial physical dominance and attractiveness with mating success. These findings thus suggest a greater importance of intrasexual competition than female choice in human male sexual selection.

There is a limit to the number of friends we can manage at any one time, Dunbar’s number, imposed by a combination of the time and the cognitive demands of maintaining relationships. ⦁ There are striking gender differences in how relationships are maintained

The Anatomy of Friendship. R.I.M. Dunbar. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Volume 22, Issue 1, January 2018, Pages 32–51. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2017.10.004

Abstract: Friendship is the single most important factor influencing our health, well-being, and happiness. Creating and maintaining friendships is, however, extremely costly, in terms of both the time that has to be invested and the cognitive mechanisms that underpin them. Nonetheless, personal social networks exhibit many constancies, notably in their size and their hierarchical structuring. Understanding the processes that give rise to these patterns and their evolutionary origins requires a multidisciplinary approach that combines social and neuropsychology as well as evolutionary biology.

Trends
⦁    Having friends has dramatic effects on our happiness, mental well-being and longevity.
⦁    There is a limit to the number of friends we can manage at any one time, sometimes known as ‘Dunbar’s number’.
⦁    This limit is imposed by a combination of the time and the cognitive demands (the latter a function of prefrontal cortex volume) of maintaining relationships.
⦁    There are striking gender differences in how relationships are maintained.
⦁    The Internet has not (yet) changed any of this.

Keywords: endorphins; gender differences; happiness; health; social networks

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On the cognitive side, some form of cost accounting (a totting up of favours owed and promises broken) must be important [10]. A survey of the causes of relationship breakdown, for example, has identified lack of caring, poor communication, jealousy, and alcohol/drugs as the main causes (accounting for approximately 57% of all breakdowns) [122], all of which suggest that some kind of tally is being kept. However, there have been no studies that have explored the cognitive bases of this accounting process (other than to emphasise the obvious need to remember past interactions).

The data on relationship breakdown should remind us that trust plays a crucial role in building and maintaining relationships [10,123,124]. The functionality of friendships (emotional support, unstinting help) depends implicitly on trust that, over the long haul, the relationship will be in approximate economic balance (i.e., debts will be repaid eventually). While close friendships (those in the innermost layers) may well involve unstinting altruism and, at least in the short term, less emphasis on scorekeeping, score-keeping and the monitoring of reputations are none-theless likely to become increasingly important in the outer layers. Interestingly, despite the kinship premium, breakdown of family relationships is unexpectedly common compared to friendships [122]. This may be because, whereas friendships simply drift apart after minor breaches of trust, kin (and romantic partners) are initially more tolerant but eventually, after many breaches of trust, so much strain has been put on the relationship that it undergoes a catastrophic fracture. As a result, the sense of ‘hurt’ is greater and reconciliation is invariably difficult to engineer [122].

Friendships are cognitively demanding because they are implicit social contracts – in effect, promises of future support. This makes them particularly susceptible to freeriding (taking the benefits without paying all the costs). Freeriding, in its many forms (stealing others’ property, reneging on obligations, behaving ungenerously and, at least in humans, trading once too often on someone’s good nature or spreading rumours about their motives), is very destructive of relationships and rapidly leads to the collapse and contraction of social networks because people become unwilling to trust more than their closest friends [125,126].

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Gendered Networks?

Aside from striking gender homophily of networks [26,40], the two sexes exhibit a number of important differences in respect of friendships. One is that, while both sexes have broadly similar social networks, women consistently have larger inner layers than men, in most cases significantly so [18,127,129]. This correlates with women’s typically better performance on mentalising tasks [127,132]. Second, women seem to have a category of friend that is almost unknown among men, namely, a same-sex best friend (a BFF, or ‘best friend forever’), in addition to a romantic partner [216]. Although this additional individual is occasionally male, the great majority are women: in a sample of 257 women’s best friends, just 18.3% were men [217]. It is unlikely that many of these male BFFs were extra lovers, since it seems difficult to maintain two equally intense sexual relationships simultaneously [85].

The two genders also differ in what maintains the emotional closeness of friendships over time. For women, this involves making the effort to spend more time talking together (either face-to-face, by phone or via the Internet), whereas talking has almost no effect on men’s friendships; what maintains the emotional quality of men’s friendships is increased investment in ‘doing things together’ (sports, drinking, etc.) [91]. Although doing things together does benefit women’s friendships, it has much less effect than it does for men.

These contrasts parallel differences in social media and phone use (women account for around two-thirds of active Facebook users [218,219] and make longer and more frequent phone calls [29]) as well as differences in style of aggression (men are more likely to respond with physical violence, while women are more likely to use verbal aggression [220]). Analyses of a large national mobile phone database suggest that women focus their phone calling on an opposite sex person of similar age much more than males do, and they do so from a much earlier age and continue for considerably longer [221].

In sum, women seem to invest more heavily in their relationships than men, whose relationships seem to be much more casual (even in the case of their most intimate relationships) [217]. For this reason, women’s friendships often seem to be more fragile and susceptible to catastrophic breakdown [122].


Check also Optimising human community sizes. R.I.M. Dunbar, R. Sosis. Evolution and Human Behavior, http://www.bipartisanalliance.com/2017/11/group-longevity-as-function-of-its-size.html

Gender Composition and Group Confidence Judgment: The Perils of All-Male Groups

Gender Composition and Group Confidence Judgment: The Perils of All-Male Groups. Steffen Keck, Wenjie Tang.  Management Science, https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/abs/10.1287/mnsc.2017.2881

Abstract: We explore the joint effects of group decision making and group gender composition on the calibration of confidence judgments. Participants in two laboratory experiments, individually and in groups of three, stated confidence interval estimates for general-knowledge questions and for financial forecasts. Across both studies, our results reveal that groups with at least one female member are significantly better calibrated than all-male groups. This effect is mediated by the extent to which group members share opinions and information during the group discussion. Moreover, we find that compared to a statistical aggregation of individual confidence intervals, group discussions have a neutral or positive effect on the quality of confidence judgments for groups with at least one female group member; in contrast, group discussion actually harms confidence calibration for all-male groups. Overall, our findings indicate that compared to all-male groups, even the inclusion of a small proportion of female members can have a strong effect on the quality of group confidence judgment.

The Rejection of Collective Religiosity Centred Around the Worship of Moral Gods Is Associated with High Mutational Load

The Mutant Says in His Heart, “There Is No God”: the Rejection of Collective Religiosity Centred Around the Worship of Moral Gods Is Associated with High Mutational Load. Edward Dutton, Guy Madison, Curtis Dunkel. Evolutionary Psychological Science, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40806-017-0133-5

Abstract: Industrialisation leads to relaxed selection and thus the accumulation of fitness-damaging genetic mutations. We argue that religion is a selected trait that would be highly sensitive to mutational load. We further argue that a specific form of religiousness was selected for in complex societies up until industrialisation based around the collective worship of moral gods. With the relaxation of selection, we predict the degeneration of this form of religion and diverse deviations from it. These deviations, however, would correlate with the same indicators because they would all be underpinned by mutational load. We test this hypothesis using two very different deviations: atheism and paranormal belief. We examine associations between these deviations and four indicators of mutational load: (1) poor general health, (2) autism, (3) fluctuating asymmetry, and (4) left-handedness. A systematic literature review combined with primary research on handedness demonstrates that atheism and/or paranormal belief is associated with all of these indicators of high mutational load.

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

Men Who Compliment a Woman's Appearance Using Metaphorical Language: Associations with Creativity, Masculinity, Intelligence and Attractiveness

Men Who Compliment a Woman's Appearance Using Metaphorical Language: Associations with Creativity, Masculinity, Intelligence and Attractiveness. Zhao Gao et al. Front. Psychol., 21 December 2017 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.02185

Abstract: Language may have evolved as a signal of mental fitness. However, it remains unclear what language form and topic men use to covertly signal mate quality. In this study 69 men created compliments to impress unfamiliar women they chose to either date or work with and provided hand scans to compute 2D4D ratio as a proxy for prenatal testosterone exposure and masculinity indicator. Compliments were coded in terms of form (literal vs. metaphorical) and topic (women's appearance vs. non-appearance), with metaphorical ones being subsequently rated by 114 women for psycholinguistic features, indices of intelligence and willingness to have a romantic relationship with the author. Results showed that in a dating context, men produced more metaphorical form compliments targeting appearance compared to the working context and they were associated with men's art creativity and negatively with 2D4D ratio (i.e., positively with masculinity). Women preferred establishing a romantic relationship with a higher proportion of the men producing metaphorical compliments in a dating than a working context. Furthermore, in the dating but not the working context, women perceived men producing such compliments as being more intelligent, and importantly this correlated with the men's actual verbal intelligence. Overall, findings suggest that men may use metaphorical language compliments targeting women's appearance in a dating context to signal covertly their mate quality.

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

Grossmann, Igor, and Harrison Oakes. 2017. “Wisdom of Yoda and Mr. Spock: The Role of Emotions and the Self”. PsyArXiv. December 21. psyarxiv.com/jy5em

Abstract: A distanced perspective and downregulated emotions are commonly viewed as central to wiser reflection on adverse experiences. The latter belief stands in contrast to the possibility that recognizing and balancing emotional diversity conveys critical insights for navigating adversity. A series of experiments (N=1,574) addressed these hypotheses, examining how wise reasoning about experienced interpersonal conflict related to presence, intensity, and balance of emotions, experimentally varying participants’ perspective (3rd- vs. 1st-person). Across the studies, including pre-registered direct replications, a 3rd- (vs. 1st-) person perspective led to wiser reasoning. Notably, wiser reasoning appeared in conjunction with greater (vs. lower) emotionality, especially the recognition of a greater number of present emotions and greater balance of intensity across experienced emotions. Together, these results demonstrate wisdom boosts in the face of experienced adversity, simultaneously suggesting that wisdom does not require the elimination of emotions. Instead, wise reflection benefits from a rich and balanced emotional life.

Parents of daughters, whether unborn or recently born, are shown to be almost twice as risk-averse as parents of sons

Female Babies and Risk-Aversion. Ganna Pogrebna, Andrew J. Oswald, David Haig.
IZA Institute of Labor Economics, Discussion Paper No. 10717. http://legacy.iza.org/en/webcontent/publications/papers/viewAbstract?dp_id=10717

Abstract: Being told the sex of your unborn child is a major exogenous 'shock'. In the first study of its kind, we collect before-and-after data from hospital wards. We test for the causal effects of learning child gender upon people's degree of risk-aversion. Using a standard Holt-Laury criterion, the parents of daughters, whether unborn or recently born, are shown to be almost twice as risk-averse as parents of sons. The study demonstrates this in longitudinal ('switching') data and cross-sectional data. The study finds it for fathers and mothers, babies in the womb and recently born children, and for a West European nation and an East European nation.

Keywords: pregnancy, risk attitudes, daughters, child gender, Trivers-Willard hypothesis

Joy is a distinct positive emotion: Assessment of joy and relationship to gratitude and well-being

Joy is a distinct positive emotion: Assessment of joy and relationship to gratitude and well-being. Philip C. Watkins, Robert A. Emmons, Madeline R. Greaves & Joshua Bell. The Journal of Positive Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2017.1414298

Abstract: In three studies we investigated joy and its relationship to subjective well-being (SWB). We developed measures of joy based on recent conceptualizations of joy in the humanities and social sciences. In Studies 1 and 2 we developed reliable measures of state and trait joy. In Study 3 we used a two-month prospective design to investigate the relationship of joy to gratitude and SWB. We found that dispositional gratitude predicted increases in state joy over time. We also found that trait joy predicted increases in state gratitude, providing evidence for an intriguing upward spiral between joy and gratitude. Finally, we found that trait joy was associated with increases in SWB over time. Factor analyses indicated that joy loaded separately from other positive emotions. We conclude that joy is a discrete positive emotion, it can be measured reliably with self-report instruments, and that it may be an important component of well-being.

Keywords: Joy, gratitude, subjective well-being, happiness

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We have seen that joy is not constrained to non-material pleasures. But what is the spiritual dynamic of joy? Much work remains to be done on this front, but in our studies we found small to moderate relationships between joy and spiritual well-being and gratitude to God. Thus, there is clearly a spiritual dimension to joy, in the words of C.S. Lewis, ‘Joy is the serious business of Heaven’ (1963, p. 93). The correlations between gratitude to God and joy support our suggestion that when a good object is experienced as a divine gift, joy is more likely, but clearly our results are far from definitive on this issue. We propose, along with Lewis (1955) and Nietzsche, that the spiritual dimension of joy may be in that it promotes spiritual longing – a longing for the transcendent. In Nietzsche’s words (2006, p. 264):

Yet all joy wants eternity –
    – Wants deep, deep, eternity.

In sum, we propose that the experience of joy is enhanced when there is a perceived spiritual purpose to the joy object, and that a spiritual thought/action tendency of joy is that it promotes a desire for the transcendent.

Assessing Intentional Resume Deception: Development and Nomological Network of a Resume Fraud Measure

Assessing Intentional Resume Deception: Development and Nomological Network of a Resume Fraud Measure. Christine A. Henle, Brian R. Dineen, Michelle K. Duffy. Journal of Business and Psychology, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10869-017-9527-4

Abstract: Resume fraud is pervasive and has detrimental consequences, but researchers lack a way to study it. We develop and validate a measure for empirically investigating resume misrepresentations purposely designed to mislead recruiters. In study 1, an initial set of items designed to measure three theorized resume fraud dimensions (fabrication, embellishment, omission) are rated for content validity. In study 2, job seekers complete the measure and its factor structure is evaluated. In study 3, another sample of job seekers is surveyed to verify the measure’s factor structure and to provide evidence regarding construct validity. In study 4, working adults who recently conducted a job search are surveyed to determine which individuals are more likely to commit resume fraud and whether resume fraud relates to critical work behaviors. We confirm the three-factor structure of our measure and offer evidence of construct validity by showing that socially desirable responding, Machiavellianism, moral identity, conscientiousness, emotional stability, and agreeableness are related to resume fraud. Additionally, we find that resume fraud predicts reduced job performance and increased workplace deviance beyond deceptive interviewing behavior. Resume fraud is rarely studied despite the negative impact it can have on job-related outcomes. Researchers can use this measure to explore further the antecedents and outcomes of resume fraud and to advise recruiters on how to minimize it. We develop a measure focusing on intentional resume misrepresentations designed to deceive recruiters. This is one of the first studies to examine the antecedents and outcomes of resume fraud.

Beauty Is in the Eye of the Beer Holder: An Initial Investigation of the Effects of Alcohol, Attractiveness, Warmth, and Competence on the Objectifying Gaze in Men

Beauty Is in the Eye of the Beer Holder: An Initial Investigation of the Effects of Alcohol, Attractiveness, Warmth, and Competence on the Objectifying Gaze in Men. Abigail R. Riemer et al. Sex Roles, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11199-017-0876-2

Abstract: Despite literature revealing the adverse consequences of objectifying gazes for women, little work has empirically examined origins of objectifying gazes by perceivers. Integrating alcohol myopia and objectification theories, we examined the effects of alcohol as well as perceived female attractiveness, warmth, and competence on objectifying gazes. Specifically, male undergraduates (n = 49) from a large U.S. Midwestern university were administered either an alcoholic or placebo beverage. After consumption, participants were asked to focus on the appearance or personality (counterbalanced) of pictured women who were previously rated as high, average, or low in attractiveness, warmth, and competence. Replicating previous work, appearance focus increased objectifying gazes as measured by decreased visual dwell time on women’s faces and increased dwell time on women’s bodies. Additionally, alcohol increased objectifying gazes. Whereas greater perceived attractiveness increased objectifying gazes, more perceived warmth and perceived competence decreased objectifying gazes. Furthermore, the effects of warmth and competence perceptions on objectifying gazes were moderated by alcohol condition; intoxicated participants objectified women low in warmth and competence to a greater extent than did sober participants. Implications for understanding men’s objectifying perceptions of women are addressed, shedding light on potential interventions for clinicians and policymakers to reduce alcohol-involved objectification and related sexual aggression.

Gender differences in most aspects of personality—Big Five traits, Dark Triad traits, self-esteem, subjective well-being, depression and values—are conspicuously larger in cultures with more egalitarian gender roles, gender socialization and sociopolitical gender equity -- objectively measured attributes such as tested cognitive abilities and physical traits such as height and blood pressure are also more different

Schmitt, D. P., Long, A. E., McPhearson, A., O'Brien, K., Remmert, B. and Shah, S. H. (2017), Personality and gender differences in global perspective. Int J Psychol, 52: 45–56. doi:10.1002/ijop.12265

Abstract: Men's and women's personalities appear to differ in several respects. Social role theories of development assume gender differences result primarily from perceived gender roles, gender socialization and sociostructural power differentials. As a consequence, social role theorists expect gender differences in personality to be smaller in cultures with more gender egalitarianism. Several large cross-cultural studies have generated sufficient data for evaluating these global personality predictions. Empirically, evidence suggests gender differences in most aspects of personality—Big Five traits, Dark Triad traits, self-esteem, subjective well-being, depression and values—are conspicuously larger in cultures with more egalitarian gender roles, gender socialization and sociopolitical gender equity. Similar patterns are evident when examining objectively measured attributes such as tested cognitive abilities and physical traits such as height and blood pressure. Social role theory appears inadequate for explaining some of the observed cultural variations in men's and women's personalities. Evolutionary theories regarding ecologically-evoked gender differences are described that may prove more useful in explaining global variation in human personality.

Preschool children and chimpanzees prefer to pay to watch punishment of antisocial other, instead of saving effort or money and stop watching

Preschool children and chimpanzees incur costs to watch punishment of antisocial others. Natacha Mendes, Nikolaus Steinbeis, Nereida Bueno-Guerra, Josep Call & Tania Singer. Nature Human Behaviour (2017). doi:10.1038/s41562-017-0264-5

Abstract: When misfortune befalls another, humans may feel distress, leading to a motivation to escape. When such misfortune is perceived as justified, however, it may be experienced as rewarding and lead to motivation to witness the misfortune. We explored when in human ontogeny such a motivation emerges and whether the motivation is shared by chimpanzees. Chimpanzees and four- to six-year-old children learned through direct interaction that an agent was either prosocial or antisocial and later saw each agent’s punishment. They were given the option to invest physical effort (chimpanzees) or monetary units (children) to continue watching. Chimpanzees and six-year-olds showed a preference for watching punishment of the antisocial agent. An additional control experiment in chimpanzees suggests that these results cannot be attributed to more generic factors such as scene coherence or informational value seeking. This indicates that both six-year-olds and chimpanzees have a motivation to watch deserved punishment enacted.

Knowing one would receive the answers to anagrams made them persist for less time trying to solve the task

Risko, E. F., Huh, M., McLean, D., & Ferguson, A. M. (2017). On the prospect of knowing: Providing solutions can reduce persistence. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 146(12), 1677-1693. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/xge0000334

Abstract: Our willingness to persist in problem solving is often held up as a critical component in being successful. Allied against this ability, however, are a number of situational factors that undermine our persistence. In the present investigation, the authors examine 1 such factor—knowing that the answers to a problem are easily accessible. Does having answers to a problem available reduce our willingness to persist in solving it ourselves? Across 4 experiments, participants (university students from a large Canadian University) solved multisolution anagrams and were either provided the answers after giving up (and knew they would receive the answers) or not. Results demonstrated that individuals persisted for less time in the former condition. In addition, participants did not seem to be aware of the effect that answers had on their decisions to quit. Implications for our understanding of the role that access to answers has on persistence across a number of domains (e.g., education, Internet) are discussed.

Exposure to male sexual scents (androstenone) influences women’s drinking (they drink more)

Tan, R., & Goldman, M. S. (2017). Exposure to male sexual scents (androstenone) influences women’s drinking. Experimental and Clinical Psychopharmacology, 25(6), 456-465. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/pha0000162

Abstract: In a demonstration of a heretofore unknown motivational pathway for alcohol consumption, we recently showed that exposure to scents emitted by human females during the fertile phase of their menstrual cycle could increase men’s drinking. The current study examined the reverse: whether exposure to male sexual scents (androstenone) would increase women’s drinking. One hundred three female participants were primed with either androstenone or a control prime (plain water) camouflaged as a men’s “cologne.” They then completed a laboratory assessment of beer consumption and related measures. (Nonalcoholic beer was used for methodological and safety reasons.) Results indicated that females exposed to the androstenone prime drank significantly more than those exposed to the control prime. Social and sexual expectancies taken subsequent to drinking (to avoid unwanted manipulation influences) were correlated with drinking in the primed group but not in the neutral group, supporting the idea that information-processing pathways related to alcohol use had been engaged in the primed group. Few females were ovulating, precluding assessment of the effects of fertility on this process. Because of the centrality of sexual signaling to fundamental evolutionary/biological forces, these results indicate a potentially powerful influence on alcohol consumption that calls for continued investigation.

The Geography of Poverty and Nutrition: Food Deserts and Food Choices Across the United States

The Geography of Poverty and Nutrition: Food Deserts and Food Choices Across the United States. Hunt Allcott, Rebecca Diamond, Jean-Pierre Dubé. NBER Working Paper No. 24094. http://www.nber.org/papers/w24094

We study the causes of “nutritional inequality”: why the wealthy tend to eat more healthfully than the poor in the U.S. Using two event study designs exploiting entry of new supermarkets and households' moves to healthier neighborhoods, we reject that neighborhood environments have economically meaningful effects on healthy eating. Using a structural demand model, we find that exposing low-income households to the same food availability and prices experienced by high-income households would reduce nutritional inequality by only 9%, while the remaining 91% is driven by differences in demand. In turn, these income-related demand differences are partially explained by education, nutrition knowledge, and regional preferences. These findings contrast with discussions of nutritional inequality that emphasize supply-side issues such as food deserts.

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35,000 supermarkets covering 40% of the United States

The married are more satisfied [...] suggesting a causal effect at all stages of the marriage, from pre-nuptual bliss to marriages of long-duration

How’s Life at Home? New Evidence on Marriage and the Set Point for Happiness. Shawn Grover, John F. Helliwell. Journal of Happiness Studies, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10902-017-9941-3

Abstract: Subjective well-being research has often found that marriage is positively correlated with well-being. Some have argued that this correlation may be result of happier people being more likely to marry. Others have presented evidence suggesting that the well-being benefits of marriage are short-lasting. Using data from the British Household Panel Survey, we control individual pre-marital well-being levels and find that the married are still more satisfied, suggesting a causal effect at all stages of the marriage, from pre-nuptual bliss to marriages of long-duration. Using new data from the United Kingdom’s Annual Population Survey, we find that the married have a less deep U-shape in life satisfaction across age groups than do the unmarried, indicating that marriage may help ease the causes of the mid-life dip in life satisfaction and that the benefits of marriage are unlikely to be short-lived. We explore friendship as a mechanism which could help explain a causal relationship between marriage and life satisfaction, and find that well-being effects of marriage are about twice as large for those whose spouse is also their best friend.

Creepiness Creeps In: Uncanny Valley Feelings Are Acquired in Childhood

Brink, K. A., Gray, K. and Wellman, H. M. (2017), Creepiness Creeps In: Uncanny Valley Feelings Are Acquired in Childhood. Child Dev. doi:10.1111/cdev.12999

Abstract: The uncanny valley posits that very human-like robots are unsettling, a phenomenon amply demonstrated in adults but unexplored in children. Two hundred forty 3- to 18-year-olds viewed one of two robots (machine-like or very human-like) and rated their feelings toward (e.g., “Does the robot make you feel weird or happy?”) and perceptions of the robot's capacities (e.g., “Does the robot think for itself?”). Like adults, children older than 9 judged the human-like robot as creepier than the machine-like robot—but younger children did not. Children's perceptions of robots’ mental capacities predicted uncanny feelings: children judge robots to be creepy depending on whether they have human-like minds. The uncanny valley is therefore acquired over development and relates to changing conceptions about robot minds.

Digital Screen Time Limits and Young Children's Psychological Well-Being: Evidence From a Population-Based Study

Przybylski, A. K. and Weinstein, N. (2017), Digital Screen Time Limits and Young Children's Psychological Well-Being: Evidence From a Population-Based Study. Child Dev. doi:10.1111/cdev.13007

Abstract: There is little empirical understanding of how young children's screen engagement links to their well-being. Data from 19,957 telephone interviews with parents of 2- to 5-year-olds assessed their children's digital screen use and psychological well-being in terms of caregiver attachment, resilience, curiosity, and positive affect in the past month. Evidence did not support implementing limits (< 1 or < 2 hr/day) as recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics, once variability in child ethnicity, age, gender, household income, and caregiver educational attainment were considered. Yet, small parabolic functions linked screen time to attachment and positive affect. Results suggest a critical cost–benefit analysis is needed to determine whether setting firm limits constitutes a judicious use of caregiver and professional resources.

Why Sex? And why only in Pairs? The Red Queen Model Wins

Why Sex? And why only in Pairs? Motty Perry, Philip J. Reny andArthur J. Robson. The Economic Journal. DOI: 10.1111/ecoj.12364

Abstract: Understanding the purpose of sex is a fundamental unresolved problem in evolutionary biology. The difficulty is not that there are too few theories of sex, the difficulty is that there are too many and none stand out. To distinguish between theories, we ask: Why are there no triparental species with offspring composed of the genetic material of three individuals? A successful theory should confer an advantage to biparental sex over asexual reproduction without conferring an even greater advantage to triparental sex. Of two leading theories (red queen and mutational), we show that only one is successful in this sense.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen_hypothesis

When Your Child Is a Psychopath

When Your Child Is a Psychopath. Barbara Bradley Hagerty. The Atlantic. June 2017
The condition has long been considered untreatable. Experts can spot it in a child as young as 3 or 4. But a new clinical approach offers hope.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/06/when-your-child-is-a-psychopath/524502/

This is a good day, Samantha tells me: 10 on a scale of 10. We’re sitting in a conference room at the San Marcos Treatment Center, just south of Austin, Texas, a space that has witnessed countless difficult conversations between troubled children, their worried parents, and clinical therapists. But today promises unalloyed joy. Samantha’s mother is visiting from Idaho, as she does every six weeks, which means lunch off campus and an excursion to Target. The girl needs supplies: new jeans, yoga pants, nail polish.

Listen to the audio version of this article:Feature stories, read aloud: download the Audm app for your iPhone.

At 11, Samantha is just over 5 feet tall and has wavy black hair and a steady gaze. She flashes a smile when I ask about her favorite subject (history), and grimaces when I ask about her least favorite (math). She seems poised and cheerful, a normal preteen. But when we steer into uncomfortable territory—the events that led her to this juvenile-treatment facility nearly 2,000 miles from her family—Samantha hesitates and looks down at her hands. “I wanted the whole world to myself,” she says. “So I made a whole entire book about how to hurt people.”

Starting at age 6, Samantha began drawing pictures of murder weapons: a knife, a bow and arrow, chemicals for poisoning, a plastic bag for suffocating. She tells me that she pretended to kill her stuffed animals.

“You were practicing on your stuffed animals?,” I ask her.

She nods.

“How did you feel when you were doing that to your stuffed animals?”

“Happy.”

“Why did it make you feel happy?”

“Because I thought that someday I was going to end up doing it on somebody.”

“Did you ever try?”

Silence.

“I choked my little brother.”

Samantha’s parents, Jen and Danny, adopted Samantha when she was 2. They already had three biological children, but they felt called to add Samantha (not her real name) and her half sister, who is two years older, to their family. They later had two more kids.

From the start, Samantha seemed a willful child, in tyrannical need of attention. But what toddler isn’t? Her biological mother had been forced to give her up because she’d lost her job and home and couldn’t provide for her four children, but there was no evidence of abuse. According to documentation from the state of Texas, Samantha met all her cognitive, emotional, and physical milestones. She had no learning disabilities, no emotional scars, no signs of ADHD or autism.

But even at a very young age, Samantha had a mean streak. When she was about 20 months old, living with foster parents in Texas, she clashed with a boy in day care. The caretaker soothed them both; problem solved. Later that day Samantha, who was already potty trained, walked over to where the boy was playing, pulled down her pants, and peed on him. “She knew exactly what she was doing,” Jen says. “There was an ability to wait until an opportune moment to exact her revenge on someone.”

When Samantha got a little older, she would pinch, trip, or push her siblings and smile if they cried. She would break into her sister’s piggy bank and rip up all the bills. Once, when Samantha was 5, Jen scolded her for being mean to one of her siblings. Samantha walked upstairs to her parents’ bathroom and washed her mother’s contact lenses down the drain. “Her behavior wasn’t impulsive,” Jen says. “It was very thoughtful, premeditated.”
“I want to kill all of you,” Samantha told her mother.

Jen, a former elementary-school teacher, and Danny, a physician, realized they were out of their depth. They consulted doctors, psychiatrists, and therapists. But Samantha only grew more dangerous. They had her admitted to a psychiatric hospital three times before sending her to a residential treatment program in Montana at age 6. Samantha would grow out of it, one psychologist assured her parents; the problem was merely delayed empathy. Samantha was impulsive, another said, something that medication would fix. Yet another suggested that she had reactive attachment disorder, which could be ameliorated with intensive therapy. More darkly—and typically, in these sorts of cases—another psychologist blamed Jen and Danny, implying that Samantha was reacting to harsh and unloving parenting.

One bitter December day in 2011, Jen was driving the children along a winding road near their home. Samantha had just turned 6. Suddenly Jen heard screaming from the back seat, and when she looked in the mirror, she saw Samantha with her hands around the throat of her 2-year-old sister, who was trapped in her car seat. Jen separated them, and once they were home, she pulled Samantha aside.

“What were you doing?,” Jen asked.

“I was trying to choke her,” Samantha said.

“You realize that would have killed her? She would not have been able to breathe. She would have died.”

“I know.”

“What about the rest of us?”

“I want to kill all of you.”

Samantha later showed Jen her sketches, and Jen watched in horror as her daughter demonstrated how to strangle or suffocate her stuffed animals. “I was so terrified,” Jen says. “I felt like I had lost control.”

Four months later, Samantha tried to strangle her baby brother, who was just two months old.

Jen and Danny had to admit that nothing seemed to make a difference—not affection, not discipline, not therapy. “I was reading and reading and reading, trying to figure out what diagnosis made sense,” Jen tells me. “What fits with the behaviors I’m seeing?” Eventually she found one condition that did seem to fit—but it was a diagnosis that all the mental-health professionals had dismissed, because it’s considered both rare and untreatable. In July 2013, Jen took Samantha to see a psychiatrist in New York City, who confirmed her suspicion.

“In the children’s mental-health world, it’s pretty much a terminal diagnosis, except your child’s not going to die,” Jen says. “It’s just that there’s no help.” She recalls walking out of the psychiatrist’s office on that warm afternoon and standing on a street corner in Manhattan as pedestrians pushed past her in a blur. A feeling flooded over her, singular, unexpected. Hope. Someone had finally acknowledged her family’s plight. Perhaps she and Danny could, against the odds, find a way to help their daughter.

Samantha was diagnosed with conduct disorder with callous and unemotional traits. She had all the characteristics of a budding psychopath.

Psychopaths have always been with us. Indeed, certain psychopathic traits have survived because they’re useful in small doses: the cool dispassion of a surgeon, the tunnel vision of an Olympic athlete, the ambitious narcissism of many a politician. But when these attributes exist in the wrong combination or in extreme forms, they can produce a dangerously antisocial individual, or even a cold-blooded killer. Only in the past quarter century have researchers zeroed in on the early signs that indicate a child could be the next Ted Bundy.

Researchers shy away from calling children psychopaths; the term carries too much stigma, and too much determinism. They prefer to describe children like Samantha as having “callous and unemotional traits,” shorthand for a cluster of characteristics and behaviors, including a lack of empathy, remorse, or guilt; shallow emotions; aggression and even cruelty; and a seeming indifference to punishment. Callous and unemotional children have no trouble hurting others to get what they want. If they do seem caring or empathetic, they’re probably trying to manipulate you.

Researchers believe that nearly 1 percent of children exhibit these traits, about as many as have autism or bipolar disorder. Until recently, the condition was seldom mentioned. Only in 2013 did the American Psychiatric Association include callous and unemotional traits in its diagnostic manual, DSM-5. The condition can go unnoticed because many children with these traits—who can be charming and smart enough to mimic social cues—are able to mask them.

More than 50 studies have found that kids with callous and unemotional traits are more likely than other kids (three times more likely, in one study) to become criminals or display aggressive, psychopathic traits later in life. And while adult psychopaths constitute only a tiny fraction of the general population, studies suggest that they commit half of all violent crimes. Ignore the problem, says Adrian Raine, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, “and it could be argued we have blood on our hands.”

Researchers believe that two paths can lead to psychopathy: one dominated by nature, the other by nurture. For some children, their environment—growing up in poverty, living with abusive parents, fending for themselves in dangerous neighborhoods—can turn them violent and coldhearted. These kids aren’t born callous and unemotional; many experts suggest that if they’re given a reprieve from their environment, they can be pulled back from psychopathy’s edge.
“I don’t know what you call this emotion,” one psychopathic prisoner said, looking at a photo of a fearful face, “but it’s what people look like just before you stab them.”

But other children display callous and unemotional traits even though they are raised by loving parents in safe neighborhoods. Large studies in the United Kingdom and elsewhere have found that this early-onset condition is highly hereditary, hardwired in the brain—and especially difficult to treat. “We’d like to think a mother and father’s love can turn everything around,” Raine says. “But there are times where parents are doing the very best they can, but the kid—even from the get-go—is just a bad kid.”

Still, researchers stress that a callous child—even one who was born that way—is not automatically destined for psychopathy. By some estimates, four out of five children with these traits do not grow up to be psychopaths. The mystery—the one everyone is trying to solve—is why some of these children develop into normal adults while others end up on death row.

A trained eye can spot a callous and unemotional child by age 3 or 4. Whereas normally developing children at that age grow agitated when they see other children cry—and either try to comfort them or bolt the scene—these kids show a chilly detachment. In fact, psychologists may even be able to trace these traits back to infancy. Researchers at King’s College London tested more than 200 five-week-old babies, tracking whether they preferred looking at a person’s face or at a red ball. Those who favored the ball displayed more callous traits two and a half years later.

As a child gets older, more-obvious warning signs appear. Kent Kiehl, a psychologist at the University of New Mexico and the author of The Psychopath Whisperer, says that one scary harbinger occurs when a kid who is 8, 9, or 10 years old commits a transgression or a crime while alone, without the pressure of peers. This reflects an interior impulse toward harm. Criminal versatility—committing different types of crimes in different settings—can also hint at future psychopathy.

But the biggest red flag is early violence. “Most of the psychopaths I meet in prison had been in fights with teachers in elementary school or junior high,” Kiehl says. “When I’d interview them, I’d say, ‘What’s the worst thing you did in school?’ And they’d say, ‘I beat the teacher unconscious.’ You’re like, That really happened? It turns out that’s very common.”

We have a fairly good idea of what an adult psychopathic brain looks like, thanks in part to Kiehl’s work. He has scanned the brains of hundreds of inmates at maximum-security prisons and chronicled the neural differences between average violent convicts and psychopaths. Broadly speaking, Kiehl and others believe that the psychopathic brain has at least two neural abnormalities—and that these same differences likely also occur in the brains of callous children.

The first abnormality appears in the limbic system, the set of brain structures involved in, among other things, processing emotions. In a psychopath’s brain, this area contains less gray matter. “It’s like a weaker muscle,” Kiehl says. A psychopath may understand, intellectually, that what he is doing is wrong, but he doesn’t feel it. “Psychopaths know the words but not the music” is how Kiehl describes it. “They just don’t have the same circuitry.”

In particular, experts point to the amygdala—a part of the limbic system—as a physiological culprit for coldhearted or violent behavior. Someone with an undersize or underactive amygdala may not be able to feel empathy or refrain from violence. For example, many psychopathic adults and callous children do not recognize fear or distress in other people’s faces. Essi Viding, a professor of developmental psychopathology at University College London recalls showing one psychopathic prisoner a series of faces with different expressions. When the prisoner came to a fearful face, he said, “I don’t know what you call this emotion, but it’s what people look like just before you stab them.”

Why does this neural quirk matter? Abigail Marsh, a researcher at Georgetown University who has studied the brains of callous and unemotional children, says that distress cues, such as fearful or sad expressions, signal submission and conciliation. “They’re designed to prevent attacks by raising the white flag. And so if you’re not sensitive to these cues, you’re much more likely to attack somebody whom other people would refrain from attacking.”

Psychopaths not only fail to recognize distress in others, they may not feel it themselves. The best physiological indicator of which young people will become violent criminals as adults is a low resting heart rate, says Adrian Raine of the University of Pennsylvania. Longitudinal studies that followed thousands of men in Sweden, the U.K., and Brazil all point to this biological anomaly. “We think that low heart rate reflects a lack of fear, and a lack of fear could predispose someone to committing fearless criminal-violence acts,” Raine says. Or perhaps there is an “optimal level of physiological arousal,” and psychopathic people seek out stimulation to increase their heart rate to normal. “For some kids, one way of getting this arousal jag in life is by shoplifting, or joining a gang, or robbing a store, or getting into a fight.” Indeed, when Daniel Waschbusch, a clinical psychologist at Penn State Hershey Medical Center, gave the most severely callous and unemotional children he worked with a stimulative medication, their behavior improved.

The second hallmark of a psychopathic brain is an overactive reward system especially primed for drugs, sex, or anything else that delivers a ping of excitement. In one study, children played a computer gambling game programmed to allow them to win early on and then slowly begin to lose. Most people will cut their losses at some point, Kent Kiehl notes, “whereas the psychopathic, callous unemotional kids keep going until they lose everything.” Their brakes don’t work, he says.

Faulty brakes may help explain why psychopaths commit brutal crimes: Their brains ignore cues about danger or punishment. “There are all these decisions we make based on threat, or the fear that something bad can happen,” says Dustin Pardini, a clinical psychologist and an associate professor of criminology at Arizona State University. “If you have less concern about the negative consequences of your actions, then you’ll be more likely to continue engaging in these behaviors. And when you get caught, you’ll be less likely to learn from your mistakes.”

Researchers see this insensitivity to punishment even in some toddlers. “These are the kids that are completely unperturbed by the fact that they’ve been put in time-out,” says Eva Kimonis, who works with callous children and their families at the University of New South Wales, in Australia. “So it’s not surprising that they keep going to time-out, because it’s not effective for them. Whereas reward—they’re very motivated by that.”

This insight is driving a new wave of treatment. What’s a clinician to do if the emotional, empathetic part of a child’s brain is broken but the reward part of the brain is humming along? “You co-opt the system,” Kiehl says. “You work with what’s left.” 



With each passing year, both nature and nurture conspire to steer a callous child toward psychopathy and block his exits to a normal life. His brain becomes a little less malleable; his environment grows less forgiving as his exhausted parents reach their limits, and as teachers, social workers, and judges begin to turn away. By his teenage years, he may not be a lost cause, since the rational part of his brain is still under construction. But he can be one scary dude.

Like the guy standing 20 feet away from me in the North Hall of Mendota Juvenile Treatment Center, in Madison, Wisconsin. The tall, lanky teenager has just emerged from his cell. Two staff members cuff his wrists, shackle his feet, and begin to lead him away. Suddenly he swivels to face me and laughs—a menacing laugh that gives me chills. As young men yell expletives, banging on the metal doors of their cells, and others stare silently through their narrow plexiglass windows, I think, This is as close as I get to Lord of the Flies.

The psychologists Michael Caldwell and Greg Van Rybroek thought much the same thing when they opened the Mendota facility in 1995, in response to a nationwide epidemic of youth violence in the early ’90s. Instead of placing young offenders in a juvenile prison until they were released to commit more—and more violent—crimes as adults, the Wisconsin legislature set up a new treatment center to try to break the cycle of pathology. Mendota would operate within the Department of Health Services, not the Department of Corrections. It would be run by psychologists and psychiatric-care technicians, not wardens and guards. It would employ one staff member for every three kids—quadruple the ratio at other juvenile-corrections facilities.

Caldwell and Van Rybroek tell me that the state’s high-security juvenile-corrections facility was supposed to send over its most mentally ill boys between the ages of 12 and 17. It did, but what Caldwell and Van Rybroek didn’t anticipate was that the boys the facility transferred were also its most menacing and recalcitrant. They recall their first few assessments. “The kid would walk out and we would turn to each other and say, ‘That’s the most dangerous person I’ve ever seen in my life,’ ” Caldwell says. Each one seemed more threatening than the last. “We’re looking at each other and saying, ‘Oh, no. What have we done?,’ ” Van Rybroek adds.

What they have done, by trial and error, is achieve something most people thought impossible: If they haven’t cured psychopathy, they’ve at least tamed it.

Many of the teenagers at Mendota grew up on the streets, without parents, and were beaten up or sexually abused. Violence became a defense mechanism. Caldwell and Van Rybroek recall a group-therapy session a few years ago in which one boy described being strung up by his wrists and hung from the ceiling as his father cut him with a knife and rubbed pepper in the wounds. “Hey,” several other kids said, “that’s like what happened to me.” They called themselves the “piñata club.”

But not everyone at Mendota was “born in hell,” as Van Rybroek puts it. Some of the boys were raised in middle-class homes with parents whose major sin was not abuse but paralysis in the face of their terrifying child. No matter the history, one secret to diverting them from adult psychopathy is to wage an unrelenting war of presence. At Mendota, the staff calls this “decompression.” The idea is to allow a young man who has been living in a state of chaos to slowly rise to the surface and acclimate to the world without resorting to violence.

Caldwell mentions that, two weeks ago, one patient became furious over some perceived slight or injustice; every time the techs checked on him, he would squirt urine or feces through the door. (This is a popular pastime at Mendota.) The techs would dodge it and return 20 minutes later, and he would do it again. “This went on for several days,” Caldwell says. “But part of the concept of decompression is that the kid’s going to get tired at some point. And one of those times you’re going to come there and he’s going to be tired, or he’s just not going to have any urine left to throw at you. And you’re going to have a little moment where you’re going to have a positive connection there.”

Cindy Ebsen, the operations director, who is also a registered nurse, gives me a tour of Mendota’s North Hall. As we pass the metal doors with their narrow windows, the boys peer out and the yelling subsides into entreaties. “Cindy, Cindy, can you get me some candy?” “I’m your favorite, aren’t I, Cindy?” “Cindy, why don’t you visit me anymore?”

She pauses to banter with each of them. The young men who pass through these halls have murdered and maimed, carjacked and robbed at gunpoint. “But they’re still kids. I love working with them, because I see the most success in this population,” as opposed to older offenders, Ebsen says. For many, friendship with her or another staff member is the first safe connection they’ve known.

Forming attachments with callous kids is important, but it’s not Mendota’s singular insight. The center’s real breakthrough involves deploying the anomalies of the psychopathic brain to one’s advantage—specifically, downplaying punishment and dangling rewards. These boys have been expelled from school, placed in group homes, arrested, and jailed. If punishment were going to rein them in, it would have by now. But their brains do respond, enthusiastically, to rewards. At Mendota, the boys can accumulate points to join ever more prestigious “clubs” (Club 19, Club 23, the VIP Club). As they ascend in status, they earn privileges and treats—candy bars, baseball cards, pizza on Saturdays, the chance to play Xbox or stay up late. Hitting someone, throwing urine, or cussing out the staff costs a boy points—but not for long, since callous and unemotional kids aren’t generally deterred by punishment.

I am, frankly, skeptical—will a kid who knocked down an elderly lady and stole her Social Security check (as one Mendota resident did) really be motivated by the promise of Pokémon cards? But then I walk down the South Hall with Ebsen. She stops and turns toward a door on our left. “Hey,” she calls, “do I hear internet radio?”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m in the VIP Club,” a voice says. “Can I show you my basketball cards?”

Ebsen unlocks the door to reveal a skinny 17-year-old boy with a nascent mustache. He fans out his collection. “This is, like, 50 basketball cards,” he says, and I can almost see his reward centers glowing. “I have the most and best basketball cards here.” Later, he sketches out his history for me: His stepmother had routinely beat him and his stepbrother had used him for sex. When he was still a preteen, he began molesting the younger girl and boy next door. The abuse continued for a few years, until the boy told his mother. “I knew it was wrong, but I didn’t care,” he says. “I just wanted the pleasure.”

At Mendota, he has begun to see that short-term pleasure could land him in prison as a sex offender, while deferred gratification can confer more-lasting dividends: a family, a job, and most of all, freedom. Unlikely as it sounds, this revelation sprang from his ardent pursuit of basketball cards.

After he details the center’s point system (a higher math that I cannot follow), the boy tells me that a similar approach should translate into success in the outside world—as if the world, too, operates on a point system. Just as consistent good behavior confers basketball cards and internet radio inside these walls, so—he believes—will it bring promotions at work. “Say you’re a cook; you can [become] a waitress if you’re doing really good,” he says. “That’s the way I look at it.”

He peers at me, as if searching for confirmation. I nod, hoping that the world will work this way for him. Even more, I hope his insight will endure.

In fact, the program at Mendota has changed the trajectory for many young men, at least in the short term. Caldwell and Van Rybroek have tracked the public records of 248 juvenile delinquents after their release. One hundred forty-seven of them had been in a juvenile-corrections facility, and 101 of them—the harder, more psychopathic cases—had received treatment at Mendota. In the four and a half years since their release, the Mendota boys have been far less likely to reoffend (64 percent versus 97 percent), and far less likely to commit a violent crime (36 percent versus 60 percent). Most striking, the ordinary delinquents have killed 16 people since their release. The boys from Mendota? Not one.

“We thought that as soon as they walked out the door, they’d last maybe a week or two and they’d have another felony on their record,” Caldwell says. “And when the data first came back that showed that that wasn’t happening, we figured there was something wrong with the data.” For two years, they tried to find mistakes or alternative explanations, but eventually they concluded that the results were real.

The question they are trying to answer now is this: Can Mendota’s treatment program not only change the behavior of these teens, but measurably reshape their brains as well? Researchers are optimistic, in part because the decision-making part of the brain continues to evolve into one’s mid‑20s. The program is like neural weight lifting, Kent Kiehl, at the University of New Mexico, says. “If you exercise this limbic-related circuitry, it’s going to get better.”

To test this hypothesis, Kiehl and the staff at Mendota are now asking some 300 young men to slide into a mobile brain scanner. The scanner records the shape and size of key areas of the boys’ brains, as well as how their brains react to tests of decision-making ability, impulsivity, and other qualities that go to the core of psychopathy. Each boy’s brain will be scanned before, during, and at the end of their time in the program, offering researchers insights into whether his improved behavior reflects better functioning inside his brain.

No one believes that Mendota graduates will develop true empathy or a heartfelt moral conscience. “They may not go from the Joker in The Dark Knight to Mister Rogers,” Caldwell tells me, laughing. But they can develop a cognitive moral conscience, an intellectual awareness that life will be more rewarding if they play by the rules. “We’re just happy if they stay on this side of the law,” Van Rybroek says. “In our world, that’s huge.”

How many can stay the course for a lifetime? Caldwell and Van Rybroek have no idea. They’re barred from contacting former patients—a policy meant to ensure that the staff and former patients maintain appropriate boundaries. But sometimes graduates write or call to share their progress, and among these correspondents, Carl, now 37, stands out.

Carl (not his real name) emailed a thankful note to Van Rybroek in 2013. Aside from one assault conviction after he left Mendota, he had stayed out of trouble for a decade and opened his own business—a funeral home near Los Angeles. His success was especially significant because he was one of the harder cases, a boy from a good home who seemed wired for violence.

Carl was born in a small town in Wisconsin. The middle child of a computer programmer and a special-education teacher, “he came out angry,” his father recalls during a phone conversation. His acts of violence started small—hitting a classmate in kindergarten—but quickly escalated: ripping the head off his favorite teddy bear, slashing the tires on the family car, starting fires, killing his sister’s hamster.

His sister remembers Carl, when he was about 8, swinging their cat in circles by its tail, faster and faster, and then letting go. “And you hear her hit the wall.” Carl just laughed.

Looking back, even Carl is puzzled by the rage that coursed through him as a child. “I remember when I bit my mom really hard, and she was bleeding and crying. I remember feeling so happy, so overjoyed—completely fulfilled and satisfied,” he tells me on the phone. “It wasn’t like someone kicked me in the face and I was trying to get him back. It was more like a weird, hard-to-explain feeling of hatred.”

His behavior confused and eventually terrified his parents. “It just got worse and worse as he got bigger,” his father tells me. “Later, when he was a teenager and occasionally incarcerated, I was happy about it. We knew where he was and that he’d be safe, and that took a load off the mind.”

By the time Carl arrived at Mendota Juvenile Treatment Center in November 1995, at age 15, he had been placed in a psychiatric hospital, a group home, foster care, or a juvenile-corrections center about a dozen times. His police record listed 18 charges, including armed burglary and three “crimes against persons,” one of which sent the victim to the hospital. Lincoln Hills, a high-security juvenile-corrections facility, foisted him on Mendota after he accumulated more than 100 serious infractions in less than four months. On an assessment called the Youth Psychopathy Checklist, he scored 38 out of a possible 40—five points higher than the average for Mendota boys, who were among the most dangerous young men in Wisconsin.

Carl had a rocky start at Mendota: weeks of abusing staff, smearing feces around his cell, yelling all night, refusing to shower, and spending much of the time locked in his room, not allowed to mix with the other kids. Slowly, though, his psychology began to shift. The staff’s unruffled constancy chipped away at his defenses. “These people were like zombies,” Carl recalls, laughing. “You could punch them in the face and they wouldn’t do anything.”

He started talking in therapy and in class. He quit mouthing off and settled down. He developed the first real bonds in his young life. “The teachers, the nurses, the staff, they all seemed to have this idea that they could make a difference in us,” he says. “Like, Huh! Something good could come of us. We were believed to have potential.”

Carl wasn’t exactly in the clear. After two stints at Mendota, he was released just before his 18th birthday, got married, and at age 20 was arrested for beating up a police officer. In prison, he wrote a suicide note, fashioned a makeshift noose, and was put on suicide watch in solitary confinement. While there, he began reading the Bible and fasting, and one day, he says, “something very powerful shifted.” He began to believe in God. Carl acknowledges that his lifestyle falls far short of the Christian ideal. But he still attends church every week, and he credits Mendota with paving the way for his conversion. By the time he was released, in 2003, his marriage had dissolved, and he moved away from Wisconsin, eventually settling in California, where he opened his funeral home.

Carl cheerfully admits that the death business appeals to him. As a child, he says, “I had a deep fascination with knives and cutting and killing, so it’s a harmless way to express some level of what you might call morbid curiosity. And I think that morbid curiosity taken to its extreme—that’s the home of the serial killers, okay? So it’s that same energy. But everything in moderation.”

Of course, his profession also requires empathy. Carl says that he had to train himself to show empathy for his grieving clients, but that it now comes naturally. His sister agrees that he’s been able to make this emotional leap. “I’ve seen him interact with the families, and he’s phenomenal,” she tells me. “He is amazing at providing empathy and providing that shoulder for them. And it does not fit with my view of him at all. I get confused. Is that true? Does he genuinely feel for them? Is he faking the whole thing? Does he even know at this point?”

After talking with Carl, I begin to see him as a remarkable success story. “Without [Mendota] and Jesus,” he tells me, “I would have been a Manson-, Bundy-, Dahmer-, or Berkowitz-type of criminal.” Sure, his fascination with the morbid is a little creepy. Yet here he is, now remarried, the father of a 1-year-old son he adores, with a flourishing business. After our phone interview, I decide to meet him in person. I want to witness his redemption for myself.

The night before I’m scheduled to fly to Los Angeles, I receive a frantic email from Carl’s wife. Carl is in police custody. His wife tells me that Carl considers himself polyamorous, and had invited one of his girlfriends over to their apartment. (This woman denies ever being romantically involved with Carl.)* They were playing with the baby when his wife returned. She was furious, and grabbed their son. Carl responded by pulling her hair, snatching the baby out of her arms, and taking her phone to prevent her from calling the police. She called from a neighbor’s house instead. (Carl says he grabbed the baby to protect him.) Three misdemeanor charges—spousal battery, abandonment and neglect of a child, and intimidation of a witness—and the psychopath who made good is now in jail.

I go to Los Angeles anyway, in the naive hope that Carl will be released on bail at his hearing the next day. A few minutes before 8:30 a.m., his wife and I meet at the courthouse and begin the long wait. She is 12 years Carl’s junior, a compact woman with long black hair and a weariness that ebbs only when she gazes at her son. She met Carl on OkCupid two years ago while visiting L.A. and—after a romance of just a few months—moved to California to marry him. Now she sits outside the courtroom, one eye on her son, fielding calls from clients of the funeral home and wondering whether she can make bail.

“I’m so sick of the drama,” she says, as the phone rings again.

Carl is a tough man to be married to. His wife says he’s funny and charming and a good listener, but he sometimes loses interest in the funeral business, leaving most of the work to her. He brings other women home for sex, even when she’s there. And while he’s never seriously beaten her up, he has slapped her.

“He would say sorry, but I don’t know if he was upset or not,” she tells me.

“So you wondered if he felt genuine remorse?”

“Honestly, I’m at a point where I don’t really care anymore. I just want my son and myself to be safe.”

Finally, at 3:15 p.m., Carl shuffles into the courtroom, handcuffed, wearing an orange L.A. County jumpsuit. He gives us a two-handed wave and flashes a carefree smile, which fades when he learns that he will not be released on bail today, despite pleading guilty to assault and battery. He will remain in jail for another three weeks.

Carl calls me the day after his release. “I really shouldn’t have a girlfriend and a wife,” he says, in what seems an uncharacteristic display of remorse. He insists that he wants to keep his family together, and says that he thinks the domestic-violence classes the court has mandated will help him. He seems sincere.

When I describe the latest twist in Carl’s story to Michael Caldwell and Greg Van Rybroek, they laugh knowingly. “This counts as a good outcome for a Mendota guy,” Caldwell says. “He’s not going to have a fully healthy adjustment to life, but he’s been able to stay mostly within the law. Even this misdemeanor—he’s not committing armed robberies or shooting people.”

His sister sees her brother’s outcome in a similar light. “This guy got dealt a shittier hand of cards than anybody I’ve ever met,” she tells me. “Who deserves to have started out life that way? And the fact that he’s not a raving lunatic, locked up for the rest of his life, or dead is insane. ”

I ask Carl whether it’s difficult to play by the rules, to simply be normal. “On a scale of 1 to 10, how hard is it?” he says. “I would say an 8. Because 8’s difficult, very difficult.”

I’ve grown to like Carl: He has a lively intellect, a willingness to admit his flaws, and a desire to be good. Is he being sincere or manipulating me? Is Carl proof that psychopathy can be tamed—or proof that the traits are so deeply embedded that they can never be dislodged? I honestly don’t know.

At the San Marcos Treatment Center, Samantha is wearing her new yoga pants from Target, but they bring her little joy. In a few hours, her mother will leave for the airport and fly back to Idaho. Samantha munches on a slice of pizza and suggests movies to watch on Jen’s laptop. She seems sad, but less about Jen’s departure than about the resumption of the center’s tedious routine. Samantha snuggles with her mom while they watch The BFG, this 11-year-old girl who can stab a teacher’s hand with a pencil at the slightest provocation.

Watching them in the darkened room, I contemplate for the hundredth time the arbitrary nature of good and evil. If Samantha’s brain is wired for callousness, if she fails to experience empathy or remorse because she lacks the neural equipment, can we say she is evil? “These kids can’t help it,” Adrian Raine says. “Kids don’t grow up wanting to be psychopaths or serial killers. They grow up wanting to become baseball players or great football stars. It’s not a choice.”
Samantha knows that her thoughts about hurting people are wrong, and she tries to suppress them. But the cognitive training cannot always compete.

Yet, Raine says, even if we don’t label them evil, we must try to head off their evil acts. It’s a daily struggle, planting the seeds of emotions that usually come so naturally—empathy, caring, remorse—in the rocky soil of a callous brain. Samantha has lived for more than two years at San Marcos, where the staff has tried to shape her behavior with regular therapy and a program that, like Mendota’s, dispenses quick but limited punishment for bad behavior and offers prizes and privileges—candy, Pokémon cards, late nights on weekends—for good behavior.

Jen and Danny have spotted green shoots of empathy. Samantha has made a friend, and recently comforted the girl after her social worker quit. They’ve detected traces of self-awareness and even remorse: Samantha knows that her thoughts about hurting people are wrong, and she tries to suppress them. But the cognitive training cannot always compete with the urge to strangle an annoying classmate, which she tried to do just the other day. “It builds up, and then I have to do it,” Samantha explains. “I can’t keep it away.”

It all feels exhausting, for Samantha and for everyone in her orbit. Later, I ask Jen whether Samantha has lovable qualities that make all this worthwhile. “It can’t be all nightmare, can it?,” I ask. She hesitates. “Or can it?”

“It is not all nightmare,” Jen responds, eventually. “She’s cute, and she can be fun, and she can be enjoyable.” She’s great at board games, she has a wonderful imagination, and now, having been apart for two years, her siblings say they miss her. But Samantha’s mood and behavior can quickly turn. “The challenge with her is that her extreme is so extreme. You’re always waiting for the other shoe to drop.”

Danny says they’re praying for the triumph of self-interest over impulse. “Our hope is that she is able to have a cognitive understanding that ‘Even though my thinking is different, my behavior needs to walk down this path so that I can enjoy the good things that I want.’ ” Because she was diagnosed relatively early, they hope that Samantha’s young, still-developing brain can be rewired for some measure of cognitive morality. And having parents like Jen and Danny could make a difference; research suggests that warm and responsive parenting can help children become less callous as they get older.

On the flip side, the New York psychiatrist told them, the fact that her symptoms appeared so early, and so dramatically, may indicate that her callousness is so deeply ingrained that little can be done to ameliorate it.

Samantha’s parents try not to second-guess their decision to adopt her. But even Samantha has wondered whether they have regrets. “She said, ‘Why did you even want me?,’ ” Jen recalls. “The real answer to that is: We didn’t know the depth of her challenges. We had no idea. I don’t know if this would be a different story if we were looking at this now. But what we tell her is: ‘You were ours.’ ”

Jen and Danny are planning to bring Samantha home this summer, a prospect the family views with some trepidation. They’re taking precautions, such as using alarms on Samantha’s bedroom door. The older children are larger and tougher than Samantha, but the family will have to keep vigil over the 5-year-old and the 7-year-old. Still, they believe she’s ready, or, more accurately, that she’s progressed as far as she can at San Marcos. They want to bring her home, to give it another try.

Of course, even if Samantha can slip easily back into home life at 11, what of the future? “Do I want that child to have a driver’s license?,” Jen asks. To go on dates? She’s smart enough for college—but will she be able to negotiate that complex society without becoming a threat? Can she have a stable romantic relationship, much less fall in love and marry? She and Danny have had to redefine success for Samantha: simply keeping her out of prison.

And yet, they love Samantha. “She’s ours, and we want to raise our children together,” Jen says. Samantha has been in residential treatment programs for most of the past five years, nearly half her life. They can’t institutionalize her forever. She needs to learn to function in the world, sooner rather than later. “I do feel there’s hope,” Jen says. “The hard part is, it’s never going to go away. It’s high-stakes parenting. If it fails, it’s going to fail big.”

* This article has been updated to clarify the relationship between Carl and the woman who visited his apartment.

Towards solving the evolutionary puzzle of suicide

Towards solving the evolutionary puzzle of suicide. C A Soper. PhD Thesis. DOI10.13140/RG.2.2.33063.04007

Abstract: How the potential for suicide – intentional, deliberate self-killing – came to evolve in the human species is a puzzle: it seems to defy the Darwinian axiom of natural selection, ‘survive and reproduce’. Searching for a solution, this thesis argues that suicide probably arose as a noxious by-product of two strongly advantageous adaptations: first, the emotional aversiveness of pain, an ancient biological stimulus that forces escape action; and second, the cognitive sophistication of the adult human brain, which unfortunately enables humans to escape pain by wilful self-extinction. These twin ‘pain and brain’ features are posited to be not only necessary but, in the absence of restraints or other means of escaping pain, sufficient conditions for suicide – they provide, respectively, the motive and the means. It follows that restraints would expectably have evolved to address suicide as a recurrent fitness threat. The likely characteristics of these defences are explored: protective systems would act, it is argued, to downgrade suicide’s ‘pain and brain’ drivers – emotional and intellectual faculties respectively – while allowing mental functioning to continue at an attenuated, usually survivable, level. Multiple lines of anti-suicide defences may account for symptoms of common mental disorders and certain other commonplace human behaviours and psychological states. Some implications are discussed, particularly with relevance to suicide prevention and the promotion of mental health.

Social Cohesion, Religious Beliefs, and the Effect of Protestantism on Suicide

Social Cohesion, Religious Beliefs, and the Effect of Protestantism on Suicide. Sascha O. Becker and Ludger Woessmann. Review of Economics and Statistics, https://doi.org/10.1162/REST_a_00708

Abstract: In an economic theory of suicide, we model social cohesion of the religious community and religious beliefs about afterlife as two mechanisms by which Protestantism increases suicide propensity. We build a unique micro-regional dataset of 452 Prussian counties in 1816-21 and 1869-71, when religiousness was still pervasive. Exploiting the concentric dispersion of Protestantism around Wittenberg, our instrumental-variable model finds that Protestantism had a substantial positive effect on suicide. Results are corroborated in first-difference models. Tests relating to the two mechanisms based on historical church-attendance data and modern suicide data suggest that the sociological channel plays the more important role.

Generous heathens? Reputational concerns and atheists' behavior toward Christians in economic games

Generous heathens? Reputational concerns and atheists' behavior toward Christians in economic games. Colleen M.Cowgill, Kimberly Rios, Ain Simpson. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Volume 73, November 2017, Pages 169-179. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2017.06.015

Highlights
•    In an economic game with Christian and atheist participants, Christians demonstrate an ingroup bias, whereas atheists do not.
•    The difference in ingroup bias is eliminated when participants think their partner is unaware of their religious identity.
•    Reputational concerns mediate atheists’ tendencies to give more to a Christian who is aware of their religious identity.

Abstract: Ample research demonstrates that people are more prosocial toward ingroup than outgroup members, and that religious believers (e.g., Christians) tend to be more prosocial than non-believers (e.g., atheists), in economic games. However, we identify a condition under which ingroup biases in such games are attenuated, focusing on prosociality among atheists. Specifically, we argue that atheists (but not Christians) experience unique reputational concerns due to stereotypes that their group is immoral, which in turn affect their behavior toward outgroup partners. Across three studies, when participants in a Dictator Game believed their religious identity was known to their partner, atheists behaved impartially toward ingroup and outgroup partners, whereas Christians consistently demonstrated an ingroup bias. The effects of religious identity on allocations to the outgroup were partially mediated by concerns about being perceived negatively by others and were eliminated by telling participants that their religious identity would be kept anonymous.

A review of epidemiologic studies on suicide before, during, and after the Holocaust

A review of epidemiologic studies on suicide before, during, and after the Holocaust. Itzhak Levav, Anat Brunstein Klomek. Psychiatry Research, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psychres.2017.12.042

Highlights
•    The pre-WWII (1933-39) suicide studies among Jews in Germany and Austria seemed to indicate higher risk of suicide compared with earlier years.
•    Suicide rates during the WWII years (1939-45) in Europe are unclear.
•    Holocaust survivors were not found to be at higher risk for suicide in Israel (1948 and later).
•    The vulnerability of Jews in Europe and the resiliency of Holocaust survivors in Israel with regard to suicide may result from the contrasting life conditions, and the meaning of life among the latter.

Abstract: The available literature on the risk of suicides related to the Holocaust (1939–1945) and its aftermath differs in its time periods, in the countries investigated, and in the robustness of its sources. Reliable information seems to indicate that the risk of suicide for Jews in Nazi Germany and Austria during the pre-war period (1933–1939) was elevated, while information on suicide during the internment in the concentration camps is fraught with problems. The latter derives from the Nazis’ decision to hide the statistics on the inmates’ causes of death, and from the prevailing life conditions that impeded separation between self-inflicted death and murder. Reliable studies conducted in Israel among refugees who entered pre-state Israel, 1939–1945, and post-World War II survivors reaching Israel (1948 on), show a mixed picture: suicide rates among the former were higher than comparison groups, while the latter group shows evidence of resilience.

Keywords: Holocaust; suicide; risk factors

Paradoxical effects of self-awareness of being observed: testing the effect of police body-worn cameras on assaults and aggression against officers

Paradoxical effects of self-awareness of being observed: testing the effect of police body-worn cameras on assaults and aggression against officers. Barak Ariel et al. Journal of Experimental Criminology, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11292-017-9311-5

Abstract
Objectives: Recently, scholars have applied self-awareness theory to explain why body-worn cameras (BWCs) affect encounters between the public and police, with its most immediate manifestation being a reduction in the use of force by and complaints against police. In this study, we report on the paradoxical effects of BWCs in the context of assaults on officers.

Methods: A multisite randomized controlled trial in ten departments, with officers wearing (or not wearing) BWCs based on random assignment of shifts. Odds ratios are used to estimate the treatment effect on assaults, along with “one study removed” sensitivity analyses. Further subgroup analyses are performed in terms of varying degrees of officers’ discretion, to enhance the practical applications of this multisite experiment. Finally, before-analyses are applied as well, including Bootstrapping and Monte-Carlo simulations to further validate the results under stricter statistical conditions, to illustrate the overall effects.

Results: A total of 394 assaults per 1000 arrests occurred during 3637 treatment shifts (M = 39.35, SD = 17.89) compared with 284 assaults per 1000 arrests during 3697 control shifts (M = 28.38; SD = 15.99), which translate into 37% higher odds of assault in treatment shifts than in control conditions. The perverse direction and relative magnitude in each experimental site in eight out of ten sites were consistent. The backfiring treatment effect was substantially more pronounced in low discretion sites, i.e., where officers strongly followed the experimental protocol (OR = 2.565; 95% CI 1.792, 3.672). At the same time, before–after analyses show that assaults were overall reduced by 61% in the participating police departments, thus suggesting paradoxical effects.

Conclusions: We explain these findings using self-awareness theory. Once self-aware that their performance is being observed by BWCs, officers become at risk of being assaulted. Results suggest that under some circumstances, self-awareness can lead to excessive self-inspection that strips power-holders of their ability to function under extreme situations. This mechanism is potentially a function of “over-deterrence”. The study further demonstrates the benefits of applying psychosocial theories to the study of social control and deterrence theories more broadly, with a robust and falsifiable mechanism that explains the conditions under which being observed stimulates either appropriate or perverse consequences.

Romanticizing the Hunter-Gatherer, Despite the Girl Infanticide, the Homicide Rate, etc.

Romanticizing the Hunter-Gatherer. William Buckner. Quillette, December 16, 2017. Check full text, table, photos, at quillette.com/2017/12/16/romanticizing-hunter-gatherer/

O Man, to whatever country you belong and whatever your opinions, listen: here is your history as I believe I have read it, not in the books of your fellow men who are liars but in Nature which never lies.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, A Discourse on Inequality

In 1966, at the ‘Man the Hunter’ symposium held at the University of Chicago, anthropologist Richard B. Lee presented a paper that would radically rewrite how academics and the public at large interpret life in hunter-gatherer societies. Questioning the notion that the hunter-gatherer way of life is a “precarious and arduous struggle for existence,” Lee instead described a society of relative comfort and abundance. Lee studied the !Kung of the Dobe area in the Kalahari Desert (also known variously as Bushmen, the San people, or the Ju/’hoansi) and noted that they required only 12 to 19 hours a week to collect all the food they needed. Lee further criticized the notion that hunter-gatherers have a low life expectancy, arguing that the proportion of individuals older than 60 among the !Kung, “compares favorably to the percentage of elderly in industrialized populations.”1 [...].

[photo removed: book Affluence without Abundance by James Suzman]

It’s not often that you see a 50-year-old paper repeatedly referenced in mainstream publications, but you can find mentions of Lee’s work pretty much everywhere today. In the Guardian, the New York Times, the London Review of Books, the Financial Times, and Salon, among others. Much of this attention has to do with two recently published books, Against the Grain by James C. Scott and Affluence without Abundance by James Suzman, both of which are informed by Lee and Sahlins’s conception of hunter-gatherer affluence. An article in the September 18 issue of the New Yorker by John Lanchester heavily cites each of these books in order to make “The Case Against Civilization.”

[...]

Let us first revisit the !Kung themselves. As Lee himself would later mention in his 1984 book on the Dobe !Kung, his original estimate of 12-19 hours worked per week did not include food processing, tool making, or general housework, and when such activities were included he estimated that the !Kung worked about 40-44 hours per week.2 Lee noted that this number still compares quite favorably to the average North American wage earner, who spends over 40 hours a week above their wage labor doing housework or shopping. Even with the revised figures, this seems to indeed point to a life of greater leisure among hunter-gatherers (or, at least, among the !Kung) than industrialized populations. However, it is important to note that this does not take into account the difficulty or danger involved in the types of tasks undertaken by hunter-gatherers. It is when you look into the data on mortality rates, and dig through diverse ethnographic accounts, that you realize how badly mistaken claims about an “original affluent society” really are.

While you’ll read much about Lee’s work in the popular press, you’ll find little on his critics. Anthropologists Henry Harpending and LuAnn Wandsnider wrote, “Lee’s (1968, 1969, 1979) studies of !Kung diet and caloric intake have generated a misleading belief among anthropologists and others that !Kung are well fed and under little or no nutritional stress.”3 They note that “1964 may have been an unusually productive year for bush food,” and compare it with work describing the severe effects of the 1973 environment, “…people were starving, and weight loss and widespread social disruption occurred.” In 1986, Nancy Howell wrote that “…the !Kung are very thin and complain often of hunger, at all times of the year.”4  In Hunter and Habitat in the Central Kalahari Desert, George B. Silberbauer states that, “Undoubtedly Bushmen do succumb in years of very serious drought,” and describes how 37 individuals of another San population, the G/wi, died of dehydration during the drought of 1939.5 And in a 1986 article entitled “Ethnographic Romanticism and the Idea of Human Nature,” Melvin Konner & Marjorie Shostak summed it up well, stating that, “Data on morbidity and mortality, though not necessarily relevant to abundance, certainly made use of the term “affluent” seem inappropriate.”6

[photo removed: Two Hadzabe men in Tanzania returning from a hunt]

In his later work, Lee would acknowledge that, “Historically, the Ju/’hoansi have had a high infant mortality rate…”7 In a study on the life histories of the !Kung Nancy Howell found that the number of infants who died before the age of 1 was roughly 20 percent.8 (As high as this number is, it compares favorably with estimates from some other hunter-gatherer societies, such as among the Casiguran Agta of the Phillipines, where the rate is 34 percent.)9  Life expectancy for the !Kung is 36 years of age.10 Again, while this number is only about half the average life expectancy found among contemporary nation states, this number still compares favorably with several other hunter-gatherer populations, such as the Hiwi (27 years) and the Agta (21 years). [...] 11

Much is made of the increased risk of infectious disease in large, concentrated, sedentary populations, but comparatively little attention has been given to the risk of ‘traveler’s diarrhea’ common among hunter-gatherers. For mobile groups, infants, the elderly, and other vulnerable individuals have little opportunity to develop resistance to local pathogens. This may help explain why infant and child mortality among hunter-gatherers tends to be so high. Across hunter-gatherer societies, only about 57% of children born survive to the age of 15. Sedentary populations of forager-horticulturalists, and acculturated hunter-gatherers, have a greater number of children surviving into adulthood, with 64% and 67%, respectively, surviving to the age of 15.

But what about egalitarianism? In a 2004 study, Michael Gurven marshals an impressive amount of cross-cultural data and notes that hunters tend to keep more of their kill for themselves and their families than they share with others.12 While there is undeniably a great deal of sharing across hunter-gatherer societies, common notions of generalized equality are greatly overstated. Even in circumstances where hunters give away more of their meat than they end up receiving from others in return, good hunters tend to be accorded high status, and rewarded with more opportunities to reproduce everywhere the relationship has been studied.13 When taking into account ‘embodied wealth’ such as hunting returns and reproductive success, and ‘relational wealth’ such as the number of exchange and sharing partners, Alden Smith et al. calculated that hunter-gatherer societies have a ‘moderate’ level of inequality, roughly comparable to that of Denmark.14 While this is less inequality than most agricultural societies and nation states, it’s not quite the level of egalitarianism many have come to expect from hunter-gatherers.

In the realm of reproductive success, hunter-gatherers are even more unequal than modern industrialized populations, exhibiting what is called “greater reproductive skew,” with males having significantly larger variance in reproductive success than females.15 Among the Ache of Paraguay, males have over 4 times the variance in reproductive success that females do, which is one of the highest ratios recorded. This means some males end up having lots of children with different women, while a significant number of males end up having none at all. This is reflected in the fact that polygynous marriage is practiced in the majority of hunter-gatherer societies for which there are data. Across these societies, the average age at marriage for females is only 13.8, while the average age at marriage for males is 20.7.16 Rather than defending what would be considered child marriage in contemporary Western societies, anthropologists often omit mentioning this information entirely.

According to anthropologists Douglas Fry and Geneviève Souillac, “Nomadic forager data suggest a human predilection toward equality, including gender equality, in ethos and action,”17 yet the available data do not support this notion in the slightest. On the contrary, in 1978 Robert Tonkinson had found that, among the Mardu hunter-gatherers of Australia, “Mardu men accord themselves greater ritual responsibility, higher status, more power, and more rights than women. It is a society in which male interests generally prevail when rights are contested and in the centrally important arena of religious life.”18 Among the Hiwi of Venezuela, and the Ache of Paraguay, female infants and children are disproportionately victims of infanticide, neglect, and child homicide.19 20 It is in fact quite common in hunter-gatherer societies that are at war, or heavily reliant on male hunting for subsistence, for female infants to be habitually neglected or killed.21 22 In 1931, Knud Rasmussen recorded that, among the Netsilik Inuit, who were almost wholly reliant on male hunting and fishing, out of 96 births from parents he interviewed, 38 girls were killed (nearly 40 percent).23

It is also instructive to compare the homicide rates of hunter-gatherer societies with those of contemporary nation states. In a 2013 paper entitled “From the Peaceful to the Warlike,” anthropologist Robert Kelly provides homicide data for 15 hunter-gatherer societies.24

tabled removed: Kelly’s table is published in ‘War, Peace and Human Nature: The Convergence of Evolutionary and Cultural Views’ edited by Douglas P. Fry, p 153.

11 of these 15 societies have homicide rates higher than that of the most violent modern nation, and 14 out of the 15 have homicide rates higher than that of the United States in 2016. The one exception, the Batek of Malaysia, have a long history of being violently attacked and enslaved by neighboring groups, and developed a survival tactic of running away and studiously avoiding conflict. Yet even they recount tales of wars in the past, where their shamans would shoot enemies with blowpipes.25 Interestingly, Ivan Tacey & Diana Riboli have noted that “…the Batek frequently recount their nostalgic memories of British doctors, administrators and army personnel visiting their communities in helicopters to deliver medicines and other supplies,” which conflicts with the idea that hunter-gatherer societies would have no want or need of anything nation states have to offer. From 1920-1955 the !Kung had a homicide rate of 42/100,000 (about 8 times that of the US rate in 2016), however Kelly mentions that, “murders ceased after 1955 due to the presence of an outside police force.”

Many of the recent articles in the popular media on hunter-gatherer societies have failed to represent these societies accurately. The picture you get from reading articles in publications like the New Yorker and the Guardian, or from anthropologists like Douglas Fry and James Suzman, is often quite different from what a deep dive into the ethnographic record reveals. The excessive reliance on a single paper published 50 years ago has contributed to some severe misconceptions about hunter-gatherer ‘affluence,’ and their relative freedom from scarcity and disease. There is a tendency to downplay the benefits of modern medicine, institutions, and infrastructure – as well as the very real costs of not having access to them – in these discussions [...]

So, what explains the popularity of this notion of an “original affluent society”? Why do people in societies with substantially greater life expectancy, reduced infant mortality, greater equality in reproductive success, and reduced rates of violence,26 27 romanticize a way of life filled with hardships they have never experienced? In wealthy, industrialized populations oriented around consumerism and occupational status, the idea that there are people out there living free of greed, in natural equality and harmony, provides an attractive alternative way of life. To quote anthropologist David Kaplan, “The original affluent society thesis then may be as much a commentary on our own society as it is a depiction of the life of hunter-gatherers. And that may be its powerful draw and lasting appeal.”28 One might think that if avarice, status hierarchies, and inequality are peculiarly modern phenomena, then maybe they aren’t part of human nature, and with the right kind of activism, and enough forward-thinking individuals, such problems can be readily solved by changing the culture.

[...]

Additionally, progressives and many anthropologists understandably do not wish to denigrate other cultures, or to give the appearance of doing so. In his book Sick Societies, anthropologist Robert Edgerton writes, “…certain practices, all anthropologists know, are sometimes not reported because doing so would offend the people being described or discredit them in the eyes of others.”29 [...]

At this year’s annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, President Alisse Waterston said that the “responsibility now for anthropologists is to participate in envisioning an alternative world.” [...]

For as long as humans have been around, people the world over have faced similar struggles: getting enough to eat, navigating social relationships, dealing with parasites and disease, raising their young. It’s a nice idea to believe that somewhere deep in the past, or still today in a more remote part of the world, there existed or exists a society that has figured it all out; where everyone is healthy and happy and equal, untouched by the difficulties of modern living. But even if violence, inequality, discrimination, and other social problems are universal and part of human nature, that doesn’t mean their prevalence can’t be reduced. They can and recent trends make this abundantly clear. Denying the scope of the problem, pretending that these social issues are uniquely modern or uniquely Western, or the product of agriculture or capitalism, does not help to fix our contemporary social ills. Instead it leaves us more confused about the causes of these problems, and, consequently, less equipped to solve them.

William Buckner is a student of Evolutionary Anthropology at UC Davis. He is interested in cultural evolution and understanding human conflict patterns across cultures. He can be followed on Twitter @Evolving_Moloch

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