Future thinking in animals: Capacities and limits

Future thinking in animals: Capacities and limits. Jonathan Redshaw, Adam Bulley. In book: The psychology of thinking about the future. Editors: Gabriele Oettingen, Timur Sevincer, Peter Gollwitzer. Guilford Publishing, November 2018. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/310490904_Future_thinking_in_animals_Capacities_and_limits

Abstract: The previous two decades have seen much theoretical and empirical research into the future thinking capacities of non-human animals. Here we critically review the evidence across six domains: (1) navigation and route planning, (2) intertemporal choice and delayed gratification, (3) preparing for future threats, (4) acquiring and constructing tools to solve future problems, (5) acquiring, saving and exchanging tokens for future rewards, and (6) acting with future desires in mind. In each domain we show that animals are capable of considerably more sophisticated future-oriented behavior than was once thought possible. Explanations for these behaviors remain contentious, yet in some cases it may be most parsimonious to attribute animals with mental representations that go beyond the here-and-now. Nevertheless, we also make the case that animals may not be able to represent future representations as future representations – an overarching capacity that allows humans to reflect on their own natural future thinking limits and act to compensate for these limits. Throughout our analysis we make specific suggestions for how future research can continue to make progress on this and other important questions in the field.

Participants were able to distinguish between truthful and deceptive communications of university students, but not of people accused of real-world serious crimes, against the notion that high-stakes deception can be identified through nonverbal cues

Individual Differences in Deception Judgments, Personality Judgments, and Meta-Accuracy. Joshua Braverman, Marley Morrow, & R. Weylin Sternglanz. https://t.co/b4nFGwPMLI

• We found that participants were able to distinguish between truthful and deceptive communications of university students, but not of people accused of real-world serious crimes; this contradicts the notion that high-stakes deception can be reliably identified through nonverbal cues.

• Participants’ personality traits did not predict their ability to detect deception; however, participants who were prone to truth bias were more likely to consider themselves introverted, agreeable, and conscientious, and they felt more anger towards hypothetical cheaters.

• Men, but not women, were overconfident in their deception detection judgments.

Our results show the relative risks of mortality for adoptive parents are always lower than those of parents with biological children

Parity and Mortality: An Examination of Different Explanatory Mechanisms Using Data on Biological and Adoptive Parents. Kieron Barclay, Martin Kolk. European Journal of Population, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10680-018-9469-1

Abstract: A growing literature has demonstrated a relationship between parity and mortality, but the explanation for that relationship remains unclear. This study aims to pick apart physiological and social explanations for the parity–mortality relationship by examining the mortality of parents who adopt children, but who have no biological children, in comparison with the mortality of parents with biological children. Using Swedish register data, we study post-reproductive mortality amongst women and men from cohorts born between 1915 and 1960, over ages 45–97. Our results show the relative risks of mortality for adoptive parents are always lower than those of parents with biological children. Mortality amongst adoptive parents is lower for those who adopt more than one child, while for parents with biological children we observe a U-shaped relationship, where parity-two parents have the lowest mortality. Our discussion considers the relative importance of physiological and social depletion effects, and selection processes.

Thirty years of great ape gestures: Even when informative gestures would be extremely helpful to them—helping their partner in a mutualistic collaborative context—apes do not produce declarative or informative signs

Thirty years of great ape gestures. Michael Tomasello, Josep Call. Animal Cognition, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10071-018-1167-1

Abstract: We and our colleagues have been doing studies of great ape gestural communication for more than 30 years. Here we attempt to spell out what we have learned. Some aspects of the process have been reliably established by multiple researchers, for example, its intentional structure and its sensitivity to the attentional state of the recipient. Other aspects are more controversial. We argue here that it is a mistake to assimilate great ape gestures to the species-typical displays of other mammals by claiming that they are fixed action patterns, as there are many differences, including the use of attention-getters. It is also a mistake, we argue, to assimilate great ape gestures to human gestures by claiming that they are used referentially and declaratively in a human-like manner, as apes’ “pointing” gesture has many limitations and they do not gesture iconically. Great ape gestures constitute a unique form of primate communication with their own unique qualities.

Monkeys form preferences for brand logos repeatedly paired with images of macaque genitals and high status monkeys, even though choosing them provided no tangible rewards (a decision mechanism not operating solely on material outcomes)

Acikalin MY, Watson KK, Fitzsimons GJ, Platt ML (2018) Rhesus macaques form preferences for brand logos through sex and social status based advertising. PLoS ONE 13(2): e0193055. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0193055

Abstract: Like humans, monkeys value information about sex and status, inviting the hypothesis that our susceptibility to these factors in advertising arises from shared, ancestral biological mechanisms that prioritize social information. To test this idea, we asked whether rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) show choice behavior that is similar to humans in response to sex and social status in advertising. Our results show that monkeys form preferences for brand logos repeatedly paired with images of macaque genitals and high status monkeys. Moreover, monkeys sustain preferences for these brand logos even though choosing them provided no tangible rewards, a finding that cannot be explained by a decision mechanism operating solely on material outcomes. Together, our results endorse the hypothesis that the power of sex and status in advertising emerges from the spontaneous engagement of shared, ancestral neural circuits that prioritize information useful for navigating the social environment. Finally, our results show that simple associative conditioning is sufficient to explain the formation of preferences for brand logos paired with sexual or status-based images.

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Prior studies [15] demonstrated that monkeys will forego fruit juice rewards to view socially-relevant images such as photos of the genitals of males and females and the faces of high status males, suggesting these images have intrinsic value for the animals. An analogous study [24] found that American college students will forego monetary rewards for a glimpse of attractive members of the opposite sex, will wait longer to view attractive individuals than unattractive ones, and will work harder to view more attractive individuals, without being aware they are doing so. These findings suggest that people and monkeys spontaneously, and perhaps subconsciously, value socially-relevant information about others. Endorsing this idea, neurons in reward-related brain areas respond to photos of attractive conspecifics in both people and monkeys [25–27].

Together, these observations invite the hypothesis that receptivity to sex and status in advertising arises from spontaneous activation of neural circuits that prioritize social information in association with neural circuits that process brand information. Associations between a product, a social reward, and the cognitive and physiological state this reward induces in the consumer alone may be sufficient to bias preferences toward the product [28]. Through repeated pairings, brand information, including logos, would eventually become prioritized just as social stimuli are, through the process of conditioning [29]. This simple hypothesis remains to be tested directly in the context of responses to sex and status in advertising. This is an important question, as we do not know whether simple conditioning with socially salient stimuli is sufficient to induce preferences for otherwise neutral logos in the context of sex- and status-based advertising, or whether a more complex, culturally-bound decision process found only in humans is necessary to produce this behavior. In other words, can simple conditioning alone lead to preferences for brands with sexual or social-status based associations? Or, are culturally rooted, complex, and uniquely human mechanisms such as effects of sexual or status-based images on self-concept or selective perception necessary for the formation of such preferences [30, 31]? Because Old World monkeys and humans diverged twenty-five million years ago, the presence of this behavior in both species would suggest evolutionarily ancient origins. Shared brain circuits mediating social perception and valuation in rhesus macaques and humans provide a mechanism by which increased valuation of stimuli associated with social information may be translated into preferences for brands associated with sex and status in advertising [22, 32, 33].

The tribal nature of the human mind leads people to value party dogma over truth; those with political sophistication, science literacy, numeracy abilities, and cognitive reflection are more affected

The Partisan Brain: An Identity-Based Model of Political Belief. Jay J. Van Bavel, Andrea Pereira. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Feb 2018. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2018.01.004

Highlights

Over 2 billion people use social media every day, and many use it to read and discuss politics. Social media also facilitate the spread of fake news and hyper-partisan content.

Online discussions of politicized topics, including political events and issues (e.g., same-sex marriage, climate change, gun control), resemble an echo chamber. That is, posts on these topics are shared primarily by people with similar ideological preferences.

Political polarization is most likely when users employ moral/emotional language. This may reflect ideological differences between people on the left versus right or partisanship.

Online partisan criticism that derogates political opponents increases political polarization.

Liberals are somewhat more likely to share cross-ideological content on social media (i.e., information posted by people with different ideological beliefs).

Democracies assume accurate knowledge by the populace, but the human attraction to fake and untrustworthy news poses a serious problem for healthy democratic functioning. We articulate why and how identification with political parties – known as partisanship – can bias information processing in the human brain. There is extensive evidence that people engage in motivated political reasoning, but recent research suggests that partisanship can alter memory, implicit evaluation, and even perceptual judgments. We propose an identity-based model of belief for understanding the influence of partisanship on these cognitive processes. This framework helps to explain why people place party loyalty over policy, and even over truth. Finally, we discuss strategies for de-biasing information processing to help to create a shared reality across partisan divides.

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In the current paper we describe how the tribal nature of the human mind leads people to value party dogma over truth.

[...]

In this vein, one study examined the relationship between math skills and political problem-solving [58. In the control condition, people who were strong at math were able to effectively solve an analytical problem. However, when political content was added to the same analytical problem – comparing crime data in cities that banned handguns against cities that did not – math skills no longer predicted how well people solved the problem. Instead, liberals were good at solving the problem when it proved that gun control reduced crime, and conservatives were good at solving the problem when it proved the opposite. In short, people with high numeracy skills were unable to reason analytically when the correct answer collided with their political beliefs. This is consistent with research showing that people who score high on various indicators of information processing, such as political sophistication ([59; although see [48), science literacy [60, numeracy abilities [58, and cognitive reflection [61, are the most likely to express beliefs congruent with those of their party.

Partisan identity has been shown to affect memory. People are more likely to incorrectly remember falsehoods that support their partisan identity: Democrats were more likely than Republicans to incorrectly remember G.W. Bush on vacation during the Katrina hurricane, and Republicans were more likely than Democrats to falsely remember seeing Barack Obama shaking hands with the President of Iran.

[...]

Going one step further, there is evidence that political affiliations may even shape the way we see the world. In line with work demonstrating that social identities alter visual processing [65, a study showed that party affiliation shaped people’s perceptions after watching the video of a political protest, in other words an identity-relevant event [66. When participants thought that the video depicted liberally minded protesters (i.e., opposing military recruitment on campus), Republicans were more in favor of police intervention than Democrats, whereas the opposite emerged when participants thought the video showed a conservative protest (i.e., opposing an abortion clinic). Faced with the same visual information, people seem to have seen different things and drawn different conclusions depending on their political affiliations.

The Parties in our Heads: Misperceptions About Party Composition and Their Consequences. Douglas J. Ahler, Gaurav Sood. Aug 2017, http://www.bipartisanalliance.com/2018/01/we-tend-to-considerably-overestimate.html

The echo chamber is overstated: the moderating effect of political interest and diverse media. Elizabeth Dubois & Grant Blank. Information, Communication & Society, http://www.bipartisanalliance.com/2018/01/the-echo-chamber-is-overstated.html

Processing political misinformation: comprehending the Trump phenomenon. Briony Swire, Adam J. Berinsky, Stephan Lewandowsky, Ullrich K. H. Ecker. Royal Society Open Science, published on-line March 01 2017. DOI: 10.1098/rsos.160802, http://rsos.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/4/3/160802

Competing cues: Older adults rely on knowledge in the face of fluency. By Brashier, Nadia M.; Umanath, Sharda; Cabeza, Roberto; Marsh, Elizabeth J. Psychology and Aging, Vol 32(4), Jun 2017, 331-337. http://www.bipartisanalliance.com/2017/07/competing-cues-older-adults-rely-on.html

Stanley, M. L., Dougherty, A. M., Yang, B. W., Henne, P., & De Brigard, F. (2017). Reasons Probably Won’t Change Your Mind: The Role of Reasons in Revising Moral Decisions. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. http://www.bipartisanalliance.com/2017/09/reasons-probably-wont-change-your-mind.html

Science Denial Across the Political Divide — Liberals and Conservatives Are Similarly Motivated to Deny Attitude-Inconsistent Science. Anthony N. Washburn, Linda J. Skitka. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 10.1177/1948550617731500. http://www.bipartisanalliance.com/2017/09/liberals-and-conservatives-are.html

Biased Policy Professionals. Sheheryar Banuri, Stefan Dercon, and Varun Gauri. World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 8113. http://www.bipartisanalliance.com/2017/08/biased-policy-professionals-world-bank.html

Dispelling the Myth: Training in Education or Neuroscience Decreases but Does Not Eliminate Beliefs in Neuromyths. Kelly Macdonald et al. Frontiers in Psychology, Aug 10 2017. http://www.bipartisanalliance.com/2017/08/training-in-education-or-neuroscience.html

Individuals with greater science literacy and education have more polarized beliefs on controversial science topics. Caitlin Drummond and Baruch Fischhoff. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 114 no. 36, pp 9587–9592, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1704882114, http://www.bipartisanalliance.com/2017/09/individuals-with-greater-science.html

Expert ability can actually impair the accuracy of expert perception when judging others' performance: Adaptation and fallibility in experts' judgments of novice performers. By Larson, J. S., & Billeter, D. M. (2017). Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 43(2), 271–288. http://www.bipartisanalliance.com/2017/06/expert-ability-can-actually-impair.html

Public Perceptions of Partisan Selective Exposure. Perryman, Mallory R. The University of Wisconsin - Madison, ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2017. 10607943. http://www.bipartisanalliance.com/2017/10/citizens-believe-others-especially.html

The Myth of Partisan Selective Exposure: A Portrait of the Online Political News Audience. Jacob L. Nelson, and James G. Webster. Social Media + Society, http://www.bipartisanalliance.com/2017/09/the-myth-of-partisan-selective-exposure.html

Echo Chamber? What Echo Chamber? Reviewing the Evidence. Axel Bruns. Future of Journalism 2017 Conference. http://www.bipartisanalliance.com/2017/09/echo-chamber-what-echo-chamber.html

Fake news and post-truth pronouncements in general and in early human development. Victor Grech. Early Human Development, http://www.bipartisanalliance.com/2017/09/fake-news-and-post-truth-pronouncements.html

Consumption of fake news is a consequence, not a cause of their readers’ voting preferences. Kahan, Dan M., Misinformation and Identity-Protective Cognition (October 2, 2017). Social Science Research Network, http://www.bipartisanalliance.com/2017/10/consumption-of-fake-news-is-consequence.html

Psychology of Intelligence Analysis. Richards J. Heuer, Jr. CIA, Mar 2007. https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/books-and-monographs/psychology-of-intelligence-analysis/

Curing Analytic Pathologies. Jeffrey R. Cooper. CIA, May 2007. https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/books-and-monographs/curing-analytic-pathologies-pathways-to-improved-intelligence-analysis-1/

Re-experiencing one’s own life-events is a phenomenon with well-defined characteristics. Maybe a representation of life-events as a continuum exists in the cognitive system, and may be further expressed in extreme conditions of psychological and physiological stress.

The life review experience: Qualitative and quantitative characteristics. Judith Katz, Noam Saadon-Grosman, Shahar Arzy. Consciousness and Cognition, Volume 48, February 2017, Pages 76-86. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2016.10.011

Highlights
•    Life review experience (LRE) is the vivid experience of one’s life-long autobiographical memories.
•    Abundant in patients in extremes situations, the LRE is yet to be thoroughly explored.
•    Phenomenological investigations in patients enable to qualitatively characterize LRE.
•    Quantitative investigation (LRE-scale) was composed as based on these phenomenological elements and run on 264 healthy people.
•    Results hint on a potential role of the neurocognitive mechanism underlying LRE in human cognition.

Abstract

Background: The life-review experience (LRE) is a most intriguing mental phenomenon that fascinated humans from time immemorial. In LRE one sees vividly a succession of one’s own life-events. While reports of LRE are abundant in the medical, psychological and popular literature, not much is known about LRE’s cognitive and psychological basis. Moreover, while LRE is known as part of the phenomenology of near-death experience, its manifestation in the general population and in other circumstances is still to be investigated.

Methods: In a first step we studied the phenomenology of LRE by means of in-depth qualitative interview of 7 people who underwent full LRE. In a second step we extracted the main characters of LRE, to develop a questionnaire and an LRE-score that best reflects LRE phenomenology. This questionnaire was then run on 264 participants of diverse ages and backgrounds, and the resulted score was further subjected to statistical analyses.

Results: Qualitative analysis showed the LRE to manifest several subtypes of characteristics in terms of order, continuity, the covered period, extension to the future, valence, emotions, and perspective taking. Quantitative results in the normal population showed normal distribution of the LRE-score over participants.

Conclusion: Re-experiencing one’s own life-events, so-called LRE, is a phenomenon with well-defined characteristics, and its subcomponents may be also evident in healthy people. This suggests that a representation of life-events as a continuum exists in the cognitive system, and maybe further expressed in extreme conditions of psychological and physiological stress.

Sleep timing is linked to sociosexuality: Evidence from German, Polish, Slovak, and Spanish Females / Those with later sleep timing were less sociosexually restricted

Sleep timing is linked to sociosexuality: Evidence from German, Polish, Slovak, and Spanish females. Juan F Díaz-Morales et al. Time & Society,  https://doi.org/10.1177/0961463X18757390

Abstract: Given the known relationship between eveningness and sociosexuality among females, the aims of this study were: (a) to analyze this relationship in four countries using midsleep time on free days and morning affect measures of morningness–eveningness and (b) to test the role of dark personality and other relevant control variables in this relationship. Data from 1483 females were collected from Poland, Spain, Germany, and Slovakia. Adjusting for age, relationship status, country, age at first intercourse, and Dark Triad traits, the most universal findings were that females with later sleep timing were less sociosexually restricted (3% shared variance with sociosexuality). Sleep timing played a greater role in sociosexuality compared to morning affect. This finding showed that Dark Triad personality is not involved in association between morningness–eveningness and sociosexuality and it added a value to the importance of sleep–wake habits in mating preferences.

Keywords: Morningness–eveningness, sociosexuality, Dark Triad, females, cross-cultural

Social capital and online hate production: A four country survey

Social capital and online hate production: A four country survey. Markus Kaakinen et al. Crime, Law and Social Change, February 2018, Volume 69, Issue 1, pp 25–39, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10611-017-9764-5

Abstract: Hateful, threatening or degrading content has become a common part of today’s online interactions. However, little is known about the people who produce such content. This study analyzes online hate content production and its associations with cognitive indicators of social capital in both offline and online social networks. The data are derived from American, Finnish, German and British Internet users aged 15–30 (N = 3,565). Measures included questions concerning online hate, social capital and contextual control variables. The results indicate that hate content production is rare overall, despite its high visibility, and is related to social capital in two key ways. First, respondents with high social capital in offline social networks were less likely to produce hate content, and second, high social capital in online networks was associated with a higher probability of production.

Legalization of the cannabis market effects: Significant reduction in rapes and property crimes, increased consumption of marijuana & reduced consumption of other drugs and both ordinary & binge alcohol

Crime and the legalization of recreational marijuana. Davide Dragone, Giovanni Prarolo, Paolo Vanin, Giulio Zanella. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2018.02.005

Abstract: First-pass evidence is provided that the legalization of the cannabis market across US states is inducing a crime drop. We exploit the staggered legalization of recreational marijuana enacted by the adjacent states of Washington (end of 2012) and Oregon (end of 2014). Combining county-level difference-in-differences and spatial regression discontinuity designs, we find that the policy caused a significant reduction in rapes and property crimes on the Washington side of the border in 2013-2014 relative to the Oregon side and relative to the pre-legalization years 2010-2012. The legalization also increased consumption of marijuana and reduced consumption of other drugs and both ordinary and binge alcohol. Four possible mechanisms are discussed: the direct psychotropic effects of cannabis; substitution away from violence-inducing substances; reallocation of police effort; reduced role of criminals in the marijuana business.

Keywords: Cannabis; Recreational marijuana; Crime

Check also Gavrilova, E., Kamada, T. and Zoutman, F. (2017), Is Legal Pot Crippling Mexican Drug Trafficking Organisations? The Effect of Medical Marijuana Laws on US Crime. Econ J. http://www.bipartisanalliance.com/2018/01/is-legal-pot-crippling-mexican-drug.html

Impact of Protestant Evangelism on Economic Outcomes: Significant increases in religiosity & income, no changes in total labor supply, assets, consumption, food security, or life satisfaction, & a clear decrease in perceived relative economic status

Randomizing Religion: The Impact of Protestant Evangelism on Economic Outcomes. Gharad T. Bryan, James J. Choi, Dean Karlan. NBER Working Paper No. 24278, http://www.nber.org/papers/w24278

To test the causal impact of religiosity, we conducted a randomized evaluation of an evangelical Protestant Christian values and theology education program that consisted of 15 weekly half-hour sessions. We analyze outcomes for 6,276 ultra-poor Filipino households six months after the program ended. We find significant increases in religiosity and income, no significant changes in total labor supply, assets, consumption, food security, or life satisfaction, and a significant decrease in perceived relative economic status. Exploratory analysis suggests the program may have improved hygienic practices and increased household discord, and that the income treatment effect may operate through increasing grit.

Men exhibit greater intergroup bias than do women, but in dating, women more strongly prefer to date men of their own racial group. Manipulating women via nationality to control for racial stereotypes, ameliorating or exacerbating the perceived threat, prevents intergroup bias.

An evolutionary perspective on intergroup dating bias. Samantha Brindley, Melissa M. McDonald, Lisa L. M. Welling & Virgil Zeigler-Hill. Comprehensive Results in Social Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1080/23743603.2018.1436939

ABSTRACT: Across a diversity of contexts, men tend to exhibit greater intergroup bias than do women. However, in the domain of dating, this trend is reversed, such that women more strongly prefer to date men of their own racial group. Researchers employing an evolutionary perspective suggest that this sex difference can be explained by an evolutionary history in which men and women faced distinct adaptive challenges in their interactions with outgroup men. For women, outgroup men posed a recurrent threat of sexual coercion. Given the importance of reproductive choice in female mating strategies, this may have exerted selection pressure for psychological mechanisms that promote avoidance of outgroup men. Here we pre-registered a two-study design to examine whether women’s intergroup dating bias, manipulated via nationality to control for racial stereotypes, could be altered by manipulating the formidability of outgroup dating targets, thereby ameliorating or exacerbating their perceived threat. The design did not produce the predicted pattern of intergroup bias, suggesting that the manipulation of group status may need to be stronger. Implications and future directions are discussed.

KEYWORDS: Intergroup bias, mate choice, dating, threat-management, female preferences

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Psychological research has documented a tendency for women, relative to men, to exhibit greater intergroup bias in the context of dating (Hitsch, Hortaçsu, & Ariely, 2010; Hwang, 2013). Furthermore, this bias may not be offset by other person characteristics, such as income, that are typically evaluated positively in male romantic partners (Hitsch, Hortascsu, & Ariely, 2006). This finding may be surprising given that much of the research on intergroup bias suggests that men tend to express greater intergroup bias than women in a variety of other contexts (reviewed in McDonald, Navarrete, & Van Vugt, 2012). Previous research attempting to explain this discrepancy has suggested that women’s greater intergroup bias in romantic and intimate contexts might be the result of an evolutionary history in which women were often the victims of sexual coercion, committed by outgroup men during intergroup conflict (McDonald, Donnellan, Cesario, & Navarrete, 2015). From this perspective, women’s intergroup bias in dating contexts may function to protect women’s reproductive choice by avoiding men more prone to reliance on the use of sexually coercive mating tactics.

Parents of high economic status invest more heavily in sons whereas parents of low economic status invest more heavily in daughters, as predicted by the Trivers-Willard hypothesis

Spending Patterns of Chinese Parents on Children’s Backpacks Support the Trivers-Willard Hypothesis: Results Based on Transaction Data from China’s Largest Online Retailer. Shige Song. Evolution and Human Behavior, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2018.02.005

Abstract: Using the 2015 student backpack transaction data from the largest e-commerce business in China, this study takes a novel “big data” approach to test the patterns of parental sex preference by comparing the difference in cost between blue and pink backpacks at different quantiles of the backpack cost distribution. Unconditional quantile regression results show that, depending on the quantile of choice, the blue-pink difference in backpack cost can be positive, negative, or zero. This indicates the presence of son preference, daughter preference, and gender indifference in the same population. Treating backpack cost as a proxy measure of parental economic status, such results indicate that parents of high economic status invest more heavily in sons whereas parents of low economic status invest more heavily in daughters, as predicted by the Trivers-Willard hypothesis. The discovery of a third group, between the high- and low-status parents, who invest equally in sons and daughters further strengthens the argument.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trivers%E2%80%93Willard_hypothesis

Review of Rupert Darwall's Green Tyranny, by Matt Ridley – Russian Spies’ Role In The Great Green Hoax

Matt Ridley: Russian Spies’ Role In The Great Green Hoax. The Times, February 19 2018.

A new book argues that nuclear winter, one of the great environmental scares of the 1980s, was fabricated by Moscow
So, Russia does appear to interfere in western politics. The FBI has charged 13 Russians with trying to influence the last American presidential election, including the whimsical detail that one of them was to build a cage to hold an actor in prison clothes pretending to be Hillary Clinton.

Meanwhile, it emerges that the Czech secret service, under KGB direction, near the end of the Cold War had a codename (“COB”) for a Labour MP they had met and hoped to influence — presumably under the bizarre delusion that he might one day be in reach of power.

There is no evidence that Jeremy Corbyn was a spy, or of collusion by Trump campaign operatives with the Russians who are charged. Yet the alleged Russian operation in America was anti-Clinton and pro-Trump. It was also pro-Bernie Sanders and pro-Jill Stein, the Green candidate — who shares with Vladimir Putin a strong dislike of fracking.

The Keystone Cops aspects of these stories should not reassure. The interference by Russian agents in western politics during the Cold War was real and dangerous. A startling example from the history of science has recently been discussed in an important book about the origins of the environmental movement, Green Tyranny by Rupert Darwall.

In June 1982, the same month as demonstrations against the Nato build-up of cruise and Pershing missiles reached fever pitch in the West, a paper appeared in AMBIO, a journal of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, authored by the Dutchman Paul Crutzen and the American John Birks. Crutzen would later share a Nobel prize for work on the ozone layer. The 1982 paper, entitled The Atmosphere after a Nuclear War: Twilight at Noon, argued that, should there be an exchange of nuclear weapons between Nato and the Soviet Union, forests and oil fields would ignite and the smoke of vast fires would cause bitter cold and mass famine: “The screening of sunlight by the fire-produced aerosol over extended periods during the growing season would eliminate much of the food production in the Northern Hemisphere.”

Carl Sagan, astronomer turned television star, then convened a conference on the “nuclear winter” hypothesis in October 1983, supported by leading environmental and anti-war pressure groups from Friends of the Earth to the Audubon Society, Planned Parenthood to the Union of Concerned Scientists. Curiously, three Soviet officials joined the conference’s board and a satellite link from the Kremlin was provided.

In December 1983, two papers appeared in the prestigious journal Science, one on the physics that became known as TTAPS after the surnames of its authors, S being for Sagan; the other on the biology, whose authors included the famous biologists Paul Ehrlich and Stephen Jay Gould as well as Sagan. The conclusion of the second paper was extreme: “Global environmental changes sufficient to cause the extinction of a major fraction of the plant and animal species on Earth are likely. In that event, the possibility of the extinction of Homo sapiens cannot be excluded.”

Who started the scare and why? One possibility is that it was fake news from the beginning. When the high-ranking Russian spy Sergei Tretyakov defected in 2000, he said that the KGB was especially proud of the fact “it created the myth of nuclear winter”. He based this on what colleagues told him and on research he did at the Red Banner Institute, the Russian spy school.

The Kremlin was certainly spooked by Nato’s threat to deploy medium-range nuclear missiles in Europe if the Warsaw Pact refused to limit its deployment of such missiles. In Darwall’s version, based on Tretyakov, Yuri Andropov, head of the KGB, “ordered the Soviet Academy of Sciences to produce a doomsday report to incite more demonstrations in West Germany”. They applied some older work by a scientist named Kirill Kondratyev on the cooling effect of dust storms in the Karakum Desert to the impact of a nuclear exchange in Germany.

Tretyakov said: “I was told the Soviet scientists knew this theory was completely ridiculous. There were no legitimate facts to support it. But it was exactly what Andropov needed to cause terror in the West.” Andropov then supposedly ordered it to be fed to contacts in the western peace and green movement.

It certainly helped Soviet propaganda. From the Pope to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament to the non-aligned nations, calls for Nato’s nuclear strategy to be rethought because of the nuclear winter theory came thick and fast. A Russian newspaper used the nuclear winter to inveigh against “inhuman aspirations of the US imperialists, who are pushing the world towards nuclear catastrophe”. The award of the Nobel peace prize in 1985 to the prominent Russian doctor Evgeny Chazov specifically mentioned his support for the nuclear winter theory.

“Propagators of the nuclear winter thus acted as dupes in a disinformation exercise scripted by the KGB”, concludes Darwall. We can never be entirely certain of this because Tretyakov’s KGB colleagues may have been exaggerating their role and he is now dead. But that the KGB did its best to fan the flames is not in doubt.

It soon became apparent that the nuclear winter hypothesis was plain wrong. As the geophysicist Russell Seitz pointed out, “soot in the TTAPS simulation is not up there as an observed consequence of nuclear explosions but because the authors told a programmer to put it there”. He added: “The model dealt with such complications as geography, winds, sunrise, sunset and patchy clouds in a stunningly elegant manner — they were ignored.” The physicist Steven Schneider concluded that “the global apocalyptic conclusions of the initial nuclear winter hypothesis can now be relegated to a vanishingly low level of probability”.

The physicists Freeman Dyson and Fred Singer, who would end up on the opposite side of the global-warming debate from Schneider and Seitz, calculated that any effects would be patchy and short-lived, and that while dry soot could generate cooling, any kind of dampness risked turning a nuclear smog into a warming factor and a short-lived one at that.

By 1986 the theory was effectively dead, and so it has remained. A nuclear war would have devastating consequences, but the impact on the climate would be the least of our worries.

The stakes were higher in the Cold War than today. The Soviet peace offensive secured the support of many western intellectuals and much of the media, and very nearly prevailed.

Weak Intervention Backfire and Criminal Hormesis: Why Some Otherwise Effective Crime Prevention Interventions Can Fail at Low Doses

Shannon J Linning, John E Eck; Weak Intervention Backfire and Criminal Hormesis: Why Some Otherwise Effective Crime Prevention Interventions Can Fail at Low Doses, The British Journal of Criminology, Volume 58, Issue 2, 15 February 2018, Pages 309–331, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azx019

Abstract: Although crime prevention tactics are designed to reduce offending, some studies have revealed instances where reported crime actually increases after introducing lower intensity interventions. An analogous trend—characterized by low-dose stimulation and high-dose inhibition—called hormesis has already been observed in the natural sciences. We argue that this phenomenon is theoretically applicable to crime prevention. Findings suggest that researchers should test varying intensities of interventions to avoid rejecting ones that would be otherwise effective at higher levels. Research using dose–response techniques and simulation models should be explored to determine whether a weak intervention backfire effect occurred or is possible. Knowledge of such information could lead to more effective crime prevention strategies and better specified analytic models for evaluation.