Monday, February 3, 2020

Echo Chambers Exist! (But They're Full of Opposing Views)

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Echo Chambers Exist! (But They're Full of Opposing Views). Jonathan Bright, Nahema Marchal, Bharath Ganesh, Stevan Rudinac. arXiv Jan 30...

Mating with immature females is an alternative tactic for brown widow males, since adult females cannibalize mating males & immature females do not; but males approached and preferred to mate with adult females

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Alternative mating tactics in a cannibalistic widow spider: do males prefer the safer option? Lenka Sentenská, Gabriele Uhl, Yael Lubin. An...

Comparing learning to normative benchmarks reveals that people overreact to signals about goods that they own, but that learning is close to Bayesian for non-owned goods

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Ownership, Learning, and Beliefs. Samuel M. Hartzmark Samuel Hirshmany Alex Imasz. November 2019. https://fraconference.com/wp-content/uploa...

American atheists are relatively liberal and likely to experience political conflict and follow political news; agnostics are particularly likely to vote and feel politically isolated from their families

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The Politics of Religious Nones. Philip Schwadel. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, February 2 2020. https://doi.org/10.1111/jss...

Exposure to half-dressed women and economic behavior: Men take more risk, no effect on willingness to compete & math performance; very little effect on economic decision making

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Exposure to half-dressed women and economic behavior. Evelina Bonnier et al. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Volume 168, De...

A sales tax is better at promoting healthy diets than the fat tax (a tax on "unhealthy" food) and the thin subsidy (a subsidy on "healthy" food)

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A sales tax is better at promoting healthy diets than the fat tax and the thin subsidy. Zarko Kalamov. Health Economics, 2020;1–14, DOI: 10....
Sunday, February 2, 2020

Liberian experiment: After one academic year, students in outsourced schools scored 0.18 σ higher in English and mathematics

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Outsourcing Education: Experimental Evidence from Liberia. Mauricio Romero, Justin Sandefur, and Wayne Aaron Sandholtz. American Economic Re...

Unwantedness across birth order explains a substantial part of the documented birth order effects in education & employment; we find no birth order effects in families who have more control over their fertility

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Birth order and unwanted fertility. Wanchuan Lin, Juan Pantano, Shuqiao Sun. Journal of Population Economics, April 2020, Volume 33, Issue 2...

The growth of behavioural complexity as well as the ex-vivo accumulation of human behaviour (non-genetically inherited behaviourome), cannot be explained by genetic/epigenetic mechanisms of inheritance

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Mechanisms of a near-orthogonal ultra-fast evolution of human behaviour as a source of culture development. Christian P. Müller. Behavioural...

The "diversity equity and inclusion statement" required of anyone hired by the University of California: Only those statements scoring high enough are passed on for scholarly review

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Wokeademia. John Cochrane. Thursday, January 30, 2020. https://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2020/01/wokeademia.html I'm working on an ec...

When facing others who hold beliefs different from our own, we do not find these encounters disturbing because of the different beliefs per se, but because we are convinced that others hold false beliefs

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The Othello Effect: People are more disturbed by others' wrong beliefs than by different beliefs. Andras Molnar, George Loewenstein. Car...

How do voters react to information about aggregate turnout? Do high turnout levels mobilize or discourage citizens to vote? We argue that it depends on individuals’ degree of conformity

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Conformity and Individuals’ Response to Information About Aggregate Turnout. André Blais, Rafael Hortala-Vallve. Political Behavior, Februar...

Macaques in the wild cooperating for copulation: Males actively shared the mating opportunities, i.e., a male copulated with a female, while his ally waited his turn and guarded them

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Cooperation for copulation: a novel ecological mechanism underlying the evolution of coalition for sharing mating opportunities. Aru Toyoda,...
Saturday, February 1, 2020

Policy interventions aimed at correcting self-servingly biased misperceptions are unlikely to be effective in the long run due to people’s ability to forget or suppress information that threatens their desired views

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The Dynamics of Motivated Beliefs. Florian Zimmermann. American Economic Review. Feb 2020, Vol. 110, No. 2: Pages 337-363. https://pubs.aeaw...

Kissing frequency was a strong indicator of both specific sexual quality & global relationship connectivity, barometer of the more immediate quality of sexual relationships & the overall relationship quality

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A kiss is not just a kiss: kissing frequency, sexual quality, attachment, and sexual and relationship satisfaction. Dean M. Busby,Veronica H...

Small-scale societies: Divinatory statements provide a version of the situation that most participants are motivated to agree with, providing efficient coordination at a minimal cost for almost all participants

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Why Divination? Evolved Psychology and Strategic Interaction in the Production of Truth. Pascal Boyer. Current Anthropology, Jan 14, 2020. h...

Despite motivation to alleviate discomfort and to maintain a morally good self-concept, more severe moral transgressions are actually remembered more frequently, more vividly, and with more detail

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The phenomenology of remembering our moral transgressions. Shenyang Huang, Matthew L. Stanley Felipe De Brigard. Memory & Cognition, Jan...

British football leagues: Male height is positively associated with social dominance; but the ‘Napoleon complex’/‘small man syndrome’ suggests that smaller males are more assertive & punitive to compensate

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Referee height influences decision making in British football leagues. Dane McCarrick, Gayle Brewer, Minna Lyons, Thomas V. Pollet & Nic...

Rolf Degen summarizing... People are reluctant to adopt low-carbon behaviors as long as "the rich" and the “egoistic people” are not doing their part

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Revisiting the Psychology of Denial Concerning Low-Carbon Behaviors: From Moral Disengagement to Generating Social Change. Susanne Stoll-Kle...

All religious, etchnic, and racial groups appear to make use of pornography; its use is associated with greater health, knowledge, and standard of living, and lower homophobia

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Pornography Use: What Do Cross-Cultural Patterns Tell Us? David L. Rowland, Dudbeth Uribe. In: Cultural Differences and the Practice of Sexu...

Our expressed virtue judgments of specific traits may function, in part, as self-interested propaganda, by influencing the social value assigned by local others to the traits we happen to possess

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Morality and the Modular Mind: Propagandistic Self-Interest and Perceptions of Virtue. Schwab, Leon T. California State University, Fullerto...

1985-2017: Media representations of climate change have become increasingly politicized, whereby political actors are increasingly featured and scientific actors less so

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Politicization and Polarization in Climate Change News Content, 1985-2017. Sedona Chinn, P. Sol Hart, Stuart Soroka. Science Communication, ...

The Smartphone as a Pacifying Technology: In moments of stress, engaging with one’s smartphone provides greater stress relief than one’s laptop or a similar smartphone belonging to someone else

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The Smartphone as a Pacifying Technology. Shiri Melumad, Michel Tuan Pham. Journal of Consumer Research, ucaa005, January 27 2020. https://d...