We think that our own behavior when drinking is similar to our sober behavior; that we are more able to maintain a balance between staying in control and having fun while drinking; that we are far from negative drinkers (like compulsive or anti-social ones); and attribute our drinking behaviors to situational factors, but describe other people as intentionally violent or aggressive

I Am Quite Mellow But I Wouldn't Say Everyone Else Is”: How UK Students Compare Their Drinking Behavior to Their Peers'. Emma L. Davies, Emma-Ben C. Lewis & Sarah E. Hennelly. Substance Use & Misuse, https://doi.org/10.1080/10826084.2017.1416403

ABSTRACT: Background: Excessive drinking is commonplace at UK Universities. Individuals may misperceive how much they drink compared to others and are less likely to think that they will suffer adverse consequences. Young people often distance themselves and their friends from ‘problem drinkers’. Objectives: The aim of the study was to explore how student drinkers compared their own drinking behaviors to the drinking behaviors of others. Methods: An online survey was completed by 416 students aged 18–30 (68.5% female). They were asked ‘how do you think your drinking compares with other people like you?' and ‘how do you think your behavior when you drink compares with other people like you?’ Answers were subjected to thematic analysis. Results: The first main theme was about ‘identification as a ‘good’ drinker’. Participants suggested their own behavior when drinking was similar to their sober behavior. Further, they viewed themselves as more able to maintain a balance between staying in control and having fun while drinking. The second main theme was about ‘distancing from being a ‘bad’ drinker. Participants distanced themselves from negative prototypical drinkers, such compulsive or anti-social drinkers. They also attributed their own drinking behaviors to situational factors, but described other people as intentionally violent or aggressive. Conclusions/Importance: These findings may explain the failure of some health messages to change drinking behaviors. If drinkers perceive that their behavior when they drink is better than other people's then they may discount intervention messages. Targeting these biases could be incorporated into future interventions.

KEYWORDS: Alcohol, correspondence bias, social comparison, prototypes, qualitative

Social identity, rather than partisanship or ideology, explains sorting in popular firlm viewership

Silver screen sorting: Social identity and selective exposure in popular film viewing. Jeremiah J. Castle, , Kyla Stepp. The Social Science Journal, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.soscij.2018.04.001

Highlights
•    Selective exposure on the basis of social identity is an important factor in film viewership.
•    Our theory is tested using a sample of college students.
•    Wide gaps in movie viewership are apparent between partisans.
•    Social identity, rather than partisanship or ideology, explains sorting in movie viewership.

Abstract: While research in media and politics has long stressed the importance of television, the political impact of movies has largely been ignored. However, a small body of literature suggests that both political docudramas and popular films may have the capacity to change the issue attitudes of viewers. Building on that work, this paper examines the potential for selective exposure in movie viewership. We develop a theory that there is large-scale sorting into popular movies rooted in social identity theory. We argue that sorting is a result of two processes: film studios marketing films towards particular social groups and individuals sorting into films based on social group characteristics. We test this theory using a unique dataset in which undergraduate students were asked to rate trailers for a variety of political docudramas and popular films. Our results indicate that there is indeed widespread sorting into popular films on the basis of social identities rooted in socio-demographic traits.

Keywords: Movies; Films; Selective exposure; Social identity; Public opinion

Young Children Negatively Evaluate and Sanction Free-riders, Even Absorbing Costs to Punish Further

Yang, Fan, You-jung Choi, Antonia Misch, Xin Yang, and Yarrow Dunham 2018. “In Defense of the Commons: Young Children Negatively Evaluate and Sanction Free-riders”. PsyArXiv. April 18. doi:10.17605/OSF.IO/XMQK8

Abstract: Human flourishing depends on individuals paying costs to contribute to common goods, but such arrangements are vulnerable to “free-riding”, in which individuals benefit from others’ contributions without paying costs themselves. Systems of tracking and sanctioning free-riders can stabilize cooperation, but the origin of such tendencies is not well understood. Here, we provide evidence that children as young as four negatively evaluate and sanction free-riders. Across six studies we show that these tendencies are robust, large in magnitude, tuned to intentional rather than unintentional non-contribution, and generally consistent across third- and first-party cases. Further, these effects cannot be accounted for by factors that frequently co-occur with free-riding, such as the costs that free-riding imposes on the group or that free-riding is often non-conformity. Our findings demonstrate that from early in life children both hold and enforce a normative expectation that individuals are intrinsically obligated to contribute to the common good.

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An evolved psychological mechanism for detecting and deterring free-riders has been suggested as a potentially important contributor to the stability of cooperation in multi-party settings, and adults’ spontaneous detection and negative evaluation of free-riders is consistent with this possibility [...]. But adults have extensive experience with institutional and other societal sanctions directed at free-riders, raising an alternative explanation: sanctioning free-riders is a learned norm. While our results do not settle this issue, they show that the tendency to sanction free-riders emerges several years prior to formal schooling, when children are not yet expected to be regular contributors and are unlikely to be sanctioned for failing to contribute themselves. Indeed, for at least two reasons our results are challenging for straightforward socialization accounts. First, in an aggregated analysis for all cases of intentional free-riding (drawn from studies 1-5), we observed greater negativity towards free-riders in younger children, a pattern inconsistent with gradual norm internalization. Second, the developmental patterns observed here appear to emerge earlier than other forms of norm enforcement. For example, compared to free-riding, unfairness in dyadic interactions presumably occurs more frequently in children’s life and thus should be a more direct targetfor socialization.

However, if not directly affected, children do not sanction such violations until middle childhood (Blake & McAuliffe, 2011; McAuliffe et al., 2015). Therefore, our findings suggest that protracted social learning and extensive group experiences are not necessary for the emergence of a tendency to sanction free-riders. Our results are consistent with proposals for an evolved psychological machinery for cheater detection and sanctioning.

 h/t: https://twitter.com/DegenRolf

Heterosexual College Students Who Hookup with Same-Sex Partners

Heterosexual College Students Who Hookup with Same-Sex Partners. Arielle Kuperberg, Alicia M. Walker. Archives of Sexual Behavior, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-018-1194-7

Abstract: Individuals who identify as heterosexual but engage in same-sex sexual behavior fascinate both researchers and the media. We analyzed the Online College Social Life Survey dataset of over 24,000 undergraduate students to examine students whose last hookup was with a same-sex partner (N = 383 men and 312 women). The characteristics of a significant minority of these students (12% of men and 25% of women) who labelled their sexual orientation “heterosexual” differed from those who self-identified as “homosexual,” “bisexual,” or “uncertain.” Differences among those who identified as heterosexual included more conservative attitudes, less prior homosexual and more prior heterosexual sexual experience, features of the hookups, and sentiments about the encounter after the fact. Latent class analysis revealed six distinctive “types” of heterosexually identified students whose last hookup was with a same-sex partner. Three types, comprising 60% of students, could be classified as mostly private sexual experimentation among those with little prior same-sex experience, including some who did not enjoy the encounter; the other two types in this group enjoyed the encounter, but differed on drunkenness and desire for a future relationship with their partner. Roughly, 12% could be classified as conforming to a “performative bisexuality” script of women publicly engaging in same-sex hookups at college parties, and the remaining 28% had strong religious practices and/or beliefs that may preclude a non-heterosexual identity, including 7% who exhibited “internalized heterosexism.” Results indicate several distinctive motivations for a heterosexual identity among those who hooked up with same-sex partners; previous research focusing on selective “types” excludes many exhibiting this discordance.

Why Do People Volunteer? An Experimental Analysis of Preferences for Time Donations Instead of Money

Why Do People Volunteer? An Experimental Analysis of Preferences for Time Donations. Alexander L. Brown, Jonathan Meer, J. Forrest Williams. Management Science, https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2017.2951

Abstract: Why do individuals volunteer their time even when recipients receive far less value than the donor’s opportunity cost? Previous models of altruism that focus on the overall impact of a gift cannot rationalize this behavior, despite its prevalence. We develop a model that allows for differential warm glow depending on the form of the donation. In a series of laboratory experiments that control for other aspects of volunteering, such as its signaling value, subjects demonstrate behavior consistent with the theoretical assumption that gifts of time produce greater utility than the same transfers in the form of money. Subjects perform an effort task, accruing earnings at potentially different wage rates for themselves or a charity of their choice, with the ability to transfer any of their personal earnings to charity at the end of the experiment. Subjects exhibit strong preferences for donating time even when differential wage rates make it costly to do so. The results provide new insights on the nature of volunteering and gift giving.

Promiscuous America: Smart, Secular, and Somewhat Less Happy

Promiscuous America: Smart, Secular, and Somewhat Less Happy. Nicholas H. Wolfinger. Institute for Family Studies, Apr 18 2018. Full article with images at https://ifstudies.org/blog/promiscuous-america-smart-secular-and-somewhat-less-happy


EXTRACTS


We like to think of America as sexually permissive. We’re bombarded with stories of rapid-fire Tinder liaisons and meaningless college hookups. The reality isn’t monastic but is more staid than most of us think. The median American woman has had three sex partners in her lifetime. The median man has had five.

These numbers have remained unchanged for decades: you have to look at people born prior to the 1940s, who came of age before the Sexual Revolution, to find lower numbers. The one exception is college-educated men, whose median tally has declined over the past couple of decades (the numbers for men who didn’t complete college have stayed the same).

But medians don’t tell the whole story. The distribution of promiscuity is skewed to the right: most people have only a few partners, but a few people have a whole lot. The data look like this:

[https://ifstudies.org/ifs-admin/resources/distribution-of-partners-by-sex-copy-w640.png]
Note: Ns = 17,252 (women) & 13,531 (men). Results are unweighted.


The yellow bars are medians, included to provide some perspective. Although most people have had only a few partners, a few have had a multitude (indeed, I capped the maximum at 100 so a single page graph would be intelligible). Five percent of women have had 16 or more partners; five percent of men have had 50 or more. One percent of American women have had over 35 partners; the comparable figure for men is 150.

[...]


The Trends

Overall, younger Americans are now having sex with fewer people than their Boomer or Gen X elders, but that’s not the case for the female promiscuous minority. The figure below looks at what portion of the sample for each survey year falls into the top five percentile for the entire sample; in order words, what proportion of women for each survey year had 16 or more partners. The data show a linear increase in the percentage of women who fall into the high side of sexual adventurousness. In 1990, about 3% of women had had over 15 sex partners. By 2016, this number was up to 7 percent. Additional analysis suggests that women’s increasing sexual adventurousness over the years of the time series represents a secular trend towards promiscuity.

[https://ifstudies.org/ifs-admin/resources/women-5-percent-trend-w640.png]
Note: N = 17,252. Results are unweighted.

The story is different for men, for whom promiscuity was most common in the previous decade. Since then, a declining proportion of men have had 50 or more sex partners. Still, top-five percentile sexual exploration remains a bit more common for men than it was in the early 1990s, near the beginning of the time series.

[https://ifstudies.org/ifs-admin/resources/men-5-percent-trend-copy-w640.png]
Notes: N = 13,531. Results are unweighted.

The Predictable Demographic Differences

The residents of Promiscuous America are predictable in many ways. They’re less likely to be married and more likely to be divorced. They’re several times as likely as their less adventurous peers to have cheated on a spouse. They watch more porn. They’re more likely to be political liberals than moderates or conservatives. Many of them live in the western United States (for women, that means the intermountain west more than the west coast). They’re more likely to live in cities than in suburbs or rural areas.

It’s also predictable that the promiscuous are less religious than other Americans, but there are nevertheless interesting differences by denominational affiliation. Christians are the least likely to fall into the top 5% of the promiscuity distribution. Still, in terms of sheer percentage points, the differences between Christians and nonbelievers are not enormous. When it comes to “Other” faiths (including Muslims, Hindus, and myriad less common religions), the men behave like Christians. Other-faith women are more likely to reside in Promiscuous America Of all survey respondents to claim a denominational affiliation, Jews are the most likely to report high promiscuity (8% of Jewish women, 6% of Jewish men). The highest levels of promiscuity naturally belong to Americans who don’t claim a denominational affiliation. This includes 10% of unaffiliated women, and 7% of unaffiliated men.

[...]

​​​The Unanticipated Correlates of Promiscuity

Two related factors—education and intelligence—are highly predictive of having a large number of sex partners. Some of us have a mental portrait of Promiscuous America that looks like the Jerry Springer Show, but this doesn’t seem to comport with reality. People with post-graduate degrees are much more likely than their less-educated peers to be promiscuous, and this is especially true of women. Over 2% of women with advanced degrees fall into the top percentile of promiscuity; in other words, over 35 sex partners. Almost 1.5% of men report top-percentile promiscuity of 150 or more partners. Both these numbers are far higher than they are for people with less formal education. Generally speaking, people with high levels of education have the highest marriage rates and the lowest divorce rates, but their ranks also contain a sprinkling of sexual sybarites.

[...]

Related to education is the comparably higher intelligence of sexually adventurous Americans. The General Social Survey contains a 10-word vocabulary test that has been shown to have a high correlation (r = .71) with sophisticated IQ test results. Obviously, a 10-question test can’t do justice to a complex concept like intelligence, but for ease of explication, I’ll refer to its results as reflecting IQ or intelligence.

Both men and women in the top percentile of promiscuity report higher intelligence scores than do their less well-traveled peers. This also holds true for women but not men in the top 5% of promiscuity. Top-five percentile men have IQs only slightly higher than their less sexually adventurous peers.

[...]

The link between education and sexual exploration has long been clear. In his brilliant and ethically-challenged study of anonymous gay sex, the late sociologist Laud Humphreys observed that his educated respondents were more willing to explore a range of sexual activities. National data also show higher rates of anal sex among educated women. A small number of highly educated people seem to have channeled this curiosity into promiscuity. Perhaps this dynamic can also explain the proclivity for poly-partner promiscuity and intelligence. Finally, these associations seem particularly strong for women.

Does It Matter if You’re Promiscuous?

There are modest but still statistically significant differences in respondent happiness by promiscuity. The 5% most promiscuous respondents of both sexes are less likely to report being “very happy” and more likely to say they are “not too happy.” This pattern holds for women when looking at the top one percentile of promiscuity, but not men. In other words, men who report having had 150 or more sex partners are not any happier or unhappier than their non-Lothario counterparts, but that’s not true for women.

[...]

Multivariate analysis reveals that the happiness gap between Promiscuous America and their less sexually adventurous peers can be partly explained by marital status. Recall that promiscuous survey respondents are less likely to be married and more likely to be divorced. Regular readers of this blog are well aware of the fact that marriage and happiness are correlated, and this association might account for why some promiscuous adults are less happy. But there are likely other reasons, some of which might be anterior to both unhappiness and promiscuity. For instance, childhood sexual abuse increases the later-life chances of both promiscuity and unhappiness. In other words, there is no way of knowing if promiscuity is directly causing people to be unhappy.

The happiness story changes when promiscuous Americans get married. These respondents are not more or less happy in their relationships than their non-promiscuous peers. Some may have relegated their infidelities to their first marriages. A small number may be in polyamorous or other forms of open relationships, although it’s impossible to know with these data.

Contrary to public perception, typical sexual behavior hasn’t changed much in recent decades. But there will always be outliers, Americans who have a multitude of sex partners. This behavior is becoming more common for women, but less common for men. Perhaps these women are experiencing the last stages of the Sexual Revolution, stages that came earlier to men. It’s evidence for this proposition that there is no male equivalent to the term “slut shaming.”

[...]

Nicholas H. Wolfinger is Professor of Family and Consumer Studies and Adjunct Professor of Sociology at the University of Utah. His most recent book is Soul Mates: Religion, Sex, Love, and Marriage among African Americans and Latinos, coauthored with W. Bradford Wilcox (Oxford University Press, 2016). Follow him on Twitter at @NickWolfinger.

Sex Differences in Attraction to Familiar and Unfamiliar Opposite-Sex Faces: Men Prefer Novelty and Women Prefer Familiarity. Anthony C. Little, Lisa M. DeBruine, Benedict C. Jones. Archives of Sexual Behavior, July 2014, Volume 43, Issue 5, pp 973–981. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-013-0120-2

Abstract: Familiarity is attractive in many types of stimuli and exposure generally increases feelings of liking. However, men desire a greater number of sexual partners than women, suggesting a preference for novelty. We examined sex differences in preferences for familiarity. In Study 1 (N = 83 women, 63 men), we exposed individuals to faces twice and found that faces were judged as more attractive on the second rating, reflecting attraction to familiar faces, with the exception that men’s ratings of female faces decreased on the second rating, demonstrating attraction to novelty. In Studies 2 (N = 42 women, 28 men) and 3 (N = 51 women, 25 men), exposure particularly decreased men’s ratings of women’s attractiveness for short-term relationships and their sexiness. In Study 4 (N = 64 women, 50 men), women’s attraction to faces was positively related to self-rated similarity to their current partner’s face, while the effect was significantly weaker for men. Potentially, men’s attraction to novelty may reflect an adaptation promoting the acquisition of a high number of sexual partners.

Perception of Physical Attractiveness When Consuming and Not Consuming Alcohol: A Meta‐Analysis

Perception of Physical Attractiveness When Consuming and Not Consuming Alcohol: A Meta‐Analysis. Molly A. Bowdring, Michael A. Sayette. Addiction, https://doi.org/10.1111/add.14227

Background and Aims: Elucidating why people drink and why drinking can lead to negative psychosocial consequences remains a crucial task for alcohol researchers. Because drinking typically occurs in social settings, broader investigation of the associations between alcohol and social experience is needed to advance understanding of both the rewarding and hazardous effects of alcohol use. This review aimed to (a) estimate alcohol's relation to the perception of others' physical attractiveness and (b) suggest theoretical and methodological considerations that may advance the study of this topic.

Methods: Systematic review of Scopus and PsycInfo databases was conducted to identify experimental and quasi‐experimental studies, with either between‐ or within‐subjects designs, that assessed attractiveness ratings provided by individuals who had and had not consumed alcohol (k=16 studies, n=1,811). A meta‐analysis was conducted to evaluate alcohol's aggregate association with physical attractiveness perceptions. Separate a priori secondary analyses examined alcohol's associations with perception of opposite‐sex (k=12 studies) and same‐sex (k=7 studies) attractiveness.

Results: The primary analysis indicated that alcohol was significantly related to enhanced attractiveness perceptions (d=0.19, 95% CI=0.05‐0.32, p=.01; I2=5.28, 95% CI=0.00 to 39.32). Analysis of alcohol's association with perception of opposite‐sex attractiveness similarly yielded a small, significant positive association (d=0.30, 95% CI=0.16‐0.44, p<.01; I2=17.49, 95% CI=0.00 to 57.75). Alcohol's relation to perception of same‐sex attractiveness was not significant (d=0.04, 95% CI=‐0.18‐0.26, p=.71; I2=54.08, 95% CI=0.00 to 81.66).

Conclusions: Experimental and quasi‐experimental studies suggest that consuming alcohol may have a small effect of increasing perceived attractiveness of people of the opposite sex.

The strength of a message can affect whether or not an individual tells the truth; Stronger messages are found to increase truth-telling by 30 percentage points

Language and Lies. Glynis Gawn, Robert Innes. Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socec.2018.04.007

Highlights
•    The strength of a message can affect whether or not an individual tells the truth.
•    An experiment measures how message type affects a sender’s intrinsic lie aversion.
•    “Strong” vs. “weak” messages significantly promote truthfulness in the experiment.
•    Stronger messages are found to increase truth-telling by 30 percentage points.
•    Differential aversion to “weak” vs. “strong” lies can be socially advantageous.

Abstract: Does an individual’s aversion to a lie depend upon the language used to communicate the lie? We adapt the Lopez-Perez and Spiegelman (2013) dot experiment to measure how a “weak” vs. “strong” message affects individuals’ propensities for truthfulness when there is a monetary incentive to lie and no other person is affected by the communication. Weak messages state a fact, whereas strong statements “solemnly swear” to the fact. In our first (between-subject) experiment, strong (vs. weak) statements increase the percentage of subjects choosing to tell the truth by approximately 30 percentage points in each of three different payoff scenarios that favor lying to a different extent. Because lies increase payoffs in the experiment, the weaker aversion to weaker lies is socially advantageous. In a second (within-subject) experiment participants choose between messages of different strength and we find (1) a preference for lying with weak (vs. strong) language, and (2) a significant fraction of subjects who are willing to pay a positive amount to avoid a strong vs. weak lie. From both experiments, we conclude that our subjects tend to be intrinsically less averse to dishonesty when a lie is conveyed with weak vs. strong language.

Keywords: Deception; Language; Communication; Lying Aversion

Using Massive Online Choice Experiments to Measure Changes in Well-being: Digital goods have created large gains in well-being that are missed by conventional measures of GDP and productivity

Using Massive Online Choice Experiments to Measure Changes in Well-being. Erik Brynjolfsson, Felix Eggers, Avinash Gannamaneni. NBER Working Paper No. 24514. http://www.nber.org/papers/w24514

Abstract: GDP and derived metrics (e.g., productivity) have been central to understanding economic progress and well-being. In principle, the change in consumer surplus (compensating expenditure) provides a superior, and more direct, measure of the change in well-being, especially for digital goods, but in practice, it has been difficult to measure. We explore the potential of massive online choice experiments to measure consumers’ willingness to accept compensation for losing access to various digital goods and thereby estimate the consumer surplus generated from these goods. We test the robustness of the approach and benchmark it against established methods, including incentive compatible choice experiments that require participants to give up Facebook for a certain period in exchange for compensation. The proposed choice experiments show convergent validity and are massively scalable. Our results indicate that digital goods have created large gains in well-being that are missed by conventional measures of GDP and productivity. By periodically querying a large, representative sample of goods and services, including those which are not priced in existing markets, changes in consumer surplus and other new measures of well-being derived from these online choice experiments have the potential for providing cost-effective supplements to existing national income and product accounts.

Greg Weiner's When Liberals Become Progressives: Because progress is an unadulterated good, it supersedes the rights of its opponents

When Liberals Become Progressives. By Greg Weiner
The New York Times, April 14, 2018, on Page A19 of the New York edition
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/13/opinion/moynihan-liberals-progressives-lost.html

Mr. Weiner was a senior aide to Senator Bob Kerrey before becoming a political scientist.

photo: Daniel Patrick Moynihan in the Capitol in 1995. He forthrightly described himself as a liberal, while today the label “progressive” is becoming more common.CreditDavid Scull/The New York Times

WORCESTER, Mass. — On the night of his election to the Senate in 1976, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Democrat of New York, declared: “I ran as a liberal. I was elected as a liberal.” This month, discussing her campaign for the Democratic nomination for governor of New York, Cynthia Nixon called for “progressive change.” The distinction matters.

In recent decades, the label “progressive” has been resurrected to replace “liberal,” a once vaunted term so successfully maligned by Republicans that it fell out of use. Both etymologically and ideologically, the switch to “progressive” carries historical freight that augurs poorly for Democrats and for the nation’s polarized politics.

Historical progressivism is an ideology whose American avatars, like Woodrow Wilson, saw progress as the inevitable outcome of human affairs. Of course, liberals and conservatives believe that their policies will result in positive outcomes, too. But it is another thing to say, as American Progressives did, that the contemporary political task was to identify a destination, grip the wheel and depress the accelerator.

The basic premise of liberal politics, by contrast, is the capacity of government to do good, especially in ameliorating economic ills. Nothing structurally impedes compromise between conservatives, who hold that the accumulated wisdom of tradition is a better guide than the hypercharged rationality of the present, and liberals, because both philosophies exist on a spectrum.

A liberal can believe that government can do more good or less, and one can debate how much to conserve. But progressivism is inherently hostile to moderation because progress is an unmitigated good. There cannot be too much of it. Like conservative fundamentalism, progressivism contributes to the polarization and paralysis of government because it makes compromise, which entails accepting less progress, not merely inadvisable but irrational. Even when progressives choose their targets strategically — Hillary Clinton, for example, called herself “a progressive who likes to get things done” — the implication is that progress is the fundamental goal and that its opponents are atavists.

Unlike liberalism, progressivism is intrinsically opposed to conservation. It renders adhering to tradition unreasonable rather than seeing it, as the liberal can, as a source of wisdom. The British philosopher Roger Scruton calls this a “culture of repudiation” of home and history alike. The critic of progress is not merely wrong but a fool. Progressivism’s critics have long experienced this as a passive-aggressive form of re-education.

Because progress is an unadulterated good, it supersedes the rights of its opponents. This is evident in progressive indifference to the rights of those who oppose progressive policies in areas like sexual liberation.

This is one reason progressives have alienated moderate voters who turned to Donald Trump in 2016. The ideology of progress tends to regard the traditions that have customarily bound communities and which mattered to Trump voters alarmed by the rapid transformation of society, as a fatuous rejection of progress. Trump supporters’ denunciation of “political correctness” is just as often a reaction to progressive condescension as it is to identity politics.

Where liberalism seeks to ameliorate economic ills, progressivism’s goal is to eradicate them. Moynihan recognized this difference between Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, which he always supported — as exemplified by his opposition to Clinton-era welfare reform — and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, which he sympathetically criticized. The New Deal alleviated poverty by cutting checks, something government does competently even if liberals and conservatives argued over the size of the checks. The Great Society partook more of a progressive effort to remake society by eradicating poverty’s causes. The result, Moynihan wrote, was the diversion of resources from welfare and jobs to “community action” programs that financed political activism.

This ideology of progress naturally aggrandizes the fastest route to the future, which is one reason progressivism has historically elevated the presidency to the center of the American regime. This insistence on progress based solely on reason also explains the doomed progressive aspiration, dating to the early 20th century, for “scientific legislation,” which seeks to transform the political into the rational. Yet policymaking in a republic is not, and should not be, purely rational. Constitutional institutions like the separation of powers instead require that policies develop gradually and command wide consensus — at least under normal circumstances.

But neither liberalism nor conservatism opposes rationality. Conservatism holds that accumulated tradition is a likelier source of wisdom than the cleverest individual at any one moment. It fears the tyranny of theory that cannot tolerate dissent. Liberalism defends constitutionalism. One of the finest traditions of 20th-century liberalism was the Cold War liberal who stood for social amelioration and against Soviet Communism. This genus — including Moynihan, Senator Henry Jackson and the longtime labor leader Lane Kirkland — was often maligned by progressives.

One cannot, of course, make too much of labels. But democracy is conducted with words, and progressivism, by its very definition, makes progress into an ideology. The appropriate label for those who do not believe in the ideology of progress but who do believe in government’s capacity to do good is “liberal.” They would do well, politically as well as philosophically, to revive it.

Greg Weiner is a political scientist at Assumption College and the author, most recently, of “American Burke: The Uncommon Liberalism of Daniel Patrick Moynihan.”

Among women, enjoyment of sexualization made them to see themselves as more heterosexual, more attractive, more open to unconventional sex acts, and having greater sentimentality about romantic relationships

Enjoyment of Sexualization and Feminism: Relationships with Sexual Self-Schema and Psychosexual Health. Michael Barnett, Idalia Maciel, Mallory Gerner. Sexuality & Culture, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12119-018-9515-5

Abstract: Feminists have debated whether enjoyment of sexualization (ES)—when women find sexualized attention from men rewarding—represents empowerment or patriarchal oppression. The purpose of this study was to investigate the psychosexual correlates of ES—sexual self-schema (SSS) and psychosexual health—among heterosexual college women (n = 754) and men (n = 389). Among women, ES was associated with a SSS in which women saw themselves as more heterosexual, more attractive, more open to unconventional sex acts, and having greater sentimentality about romantic relationships. Regarding psychosexual health, ES was not linked with general self-esteem but was associated with higher sexual esteem and lower sexual depression. Among men, ES was not related to SSS or psychosexual health. Overall, among women, ES was linked with positive outcomes, and it may represent women conforming to societal norms and using sexualized attention in order to obtain romantic intimacy. Rather than internalized misogyny, ES may represent an open approach to sexuality in which women take advantage of their sexualized position in society for their own empowerment.

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Based upon our results, we cannot indicate whether ES is or is not a response to oppression, but it appears that for some women, it may be a strategic response that may have some beneficial outcomes. Our results seem to support the particular feminist view that ES may be a reflection of an open view of sexuality that allows for a sense of empowerment. More importantly, it may reflect women’s sense of awareness of their sexualized roles in society, and rather than falling victim to it, they have decided to use this awareness for their own benefit.
 

"A great deal of the public outcry against fake news, echo chambers and polarization on social media is itself based on misinformation"

Rolf Degen summarizes (https://twitter.com/DegenRolf): "A great deal of the public outcry against fake news, echo chambers and polarization on social media is itself based on misinformation."

Review of Barbera, Pablo and Tucker, Joshua A. and Guess, Andrew and Vaccari, Cristian and Siegel, Alexandra and Sanovich, Sergey and Stukal, Denis and Nyhan, Brendan (2018) Social media, political polarization, and political disinformation: a review of the scientific literature. William + Flora Hewlett Foundation, California. http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/87402/

Abstract: The following report is intended to provide an overview of the current state of the literature on the relationship between social media; political polarization; and political “disinformation,” a term used to encompass a wide range of types of information about politics found online, including “fake news,” rumors, deliberately factually incorrect information, inadvertently factually incorrect information, politically slanted information, and “hyperpartisan” news. The review of the literature is provided in six separate sections, each of which can be read individually but that cumulatively are intended to provide an overview of what is known — and unknown — about the relationship between social media, political polarization, and disinformation. The report concludes by identifying key gaps in our understanding of these phenomena and the data that are needed to address them.



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The current conventional wisdom on the impact of misinformation is mostly based on journalistic reports documenting its spread during the 2016 election. Some of the earliest reporting on this topic was produced by Craig Silverman of Buzzfeed News. In a series of articles published around the time of the election, he demonstrated that engagement on Facebook was higher for fake content than for stories from major news outlets. Additional reporting by other outlets corroborated these initial findings (see e.g., Higgins et al. 2016; Rogers & Bromwich 2016; Timberg 2016). Overall, these reports paint a picture of the online news ecosystem in which misinformation and hyperpartisan stories are shared at rates comparable to news stories by mainstream media outlets, reaching millions of people.

This evidence has provided new fuel to the debate on the internet and social media as ideological echo chambers. The prevailing narrative is that online misinformation is amplified in partisan communities of like-minded individuals, where it goes unchallenged due to ranking algorithms that filter out any dissenting voice (see e.g., Pariser 2011; del Vicario et al. 2016). One of the leading proponents of this view is Cass Sunstein, who in his most recent book, #Republic, warns that balkanized online speech markets represent new threats to democracy because they are a breeding ground for informational cascades of “fake news” and conspiracy theories (Sunstein 2017). The outcome of this process, he argues, would be a society that is ill-informed and increasingly segregated and polarized along partisan lines, making political compromise increasingly unlikely.

However, the consensus in the scholarly literature is not as clear as these accounts would suggest. Boxell et al. (2017) show that, even if mass political polarization has grown in recent times, this increase has been largest among citizens least likely to use the internet and social media. Their results reveal that “the internet explains a small share of the recent growth in polarization” (p. 10612). Bakshy et al. (2015) and Barberá (N.d.) find that Facebook and Twitter users are exposed to a surprisingly high level of diverse views. Wojcieszak and Mutz (2009) provide similar evidence of frequent cross-cutting political exchanges in online discussion spaces. Survey data collected by the Pew Research Center (Duggan & Smith 2016) show that most users report being exposed to a variety of viewpoints on social media. Forty percent of social media users across different countries report being exposed to a diverse range of sources, according to data from 2017 Reuters Institute Digital News Report (Newman et al. 2017). Finally, regarding the spread of misinformation, Allcott and Gentzkow (2017) find that even if “fake news” stories were widely shared during the 2016 election, the average American saw, at most, several of them on social media.

Put together, this body of work challenges the conventional wisdom, but in many ways raises more questions than it answers. Even if average cross-cutting exposure is relatively high on average, there may be pockets of individuals who are indeed fully embedded in politically homogeneous communities, for whom online consumption of information could lead to increased extremism. Given the nearly universal presence of journalists on social media, messages shared on these platforms could have indirect effects even among the offline population. We also know little about the long-term consequences of online news consumption on political disaffection, civic knowledge, political participation, and social capital.

There is a clear need for further research addressing the questions above. In trying to structure the discussion of what is known and not yet known within this research agenda, it is useful to consider three potential mechanisms by which online consumption of political information could be impacting political processes: (1) changes in the volume of information being consumed, (2) the (diversity of) sources of such political content, and (3) how it is framed. The following sections discuss the effect of exposure to (mis)information online in key societal outcomes by focusing on how research on these three mechanisms helps resolve the tension between theory and empirics described above, and informs our knowledge of such broader questions.

The Impact of the Dodd-Frank Act on Small Business: small loans fell 9pct in large banks, and double that in small banks, and has not partially recovered in eight years until regulatory easing was announced recently

The Impact of the Dodd-Frank Act on Small Business. Michael D. Bordo, John V. Duca. NBER Working Paper No. 24501, www.nber.org/papers/w24501

There are concerns that the Dodd-Frank Act (DFA) has impeded small business lending. By increasing the fixed regulatory compliance requirements needed to make business loans and operate a bank, the DFA disproportionately reduced the incentives for all banks to make very modest loans and reduced the viability of small banks, whose small-business share of [commercial and industrial loans, C&I loans] is generally much higher than that of larger banks. Despite an economic recovery, the small loan share of C&I loans at large banks and banks with $300 or more million in assets has fallen by 9 percentage points since the DFA was passed in 2010, with the magnitude of the decline twice as large at small banks. Controlling for cyclical effects and bank size, we find that these declines in the small loan share of C&I loans are almost all statistically attributed to the change in regulatory regime. Examining Federal Reserve survey data, we find evidence that the DFA prompted a relative tightening of bank credit standards on C&I loans to small versus large firms, consistent with the DFA inducing a decline in small business lending through loan supply effects. We also empirically model the pace of business formation, finding that it had downshifted around the time when the DFA and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act were announced. Timing patterns suggest that business formation has more recently ticked higher, coinciding with efforts to provide regulatory relief to smaller banks via modifying rules implementing the DFA. The upturn contrasts with the impact of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which appears to persistently restrain business formation

Current evidence does not support that losses tend to be any more impactful than gains; why acceptance of loss aversion as a general principle remains pervasive and persistent among social scientists?

The Loss of Loss Aversion: Will It Loom Larger than Its Gain? David Gal, Derek D Rucker. Journal of Consumer Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1002/jcpy.1047

Abstract: Loss aversion, the principle that losses loom larger than gains, is among the most widely accepted ideas in the social sciences. The first part of this article introduces and discusses the construct of loss aversion. The second part of this article reviews evidence in support of loss aversion. The upshot of this review is that current evidence does not support that losses, on balance, tend to be any more impactful than gains. The third part of this article aims to address the question of why acceptance of loss aversion as a general principle remains pervasive and persistent among social scientists, including consumer psychologists, despite evidence to the contrary. This analysis aims to connect the persistence of a belief in loss aversion to more general ideas about belief acceptance and persistence in science. The final part of the article discusses how a more contextualized perspective of the relative impact of losses versus gains can open new areas of inquiry that are squarely in the domain of consumer psychology.

Check also Acceptable losses: the debatable origins of loss aversion. Eldad Yechiam. Psychological Research, https://www.bipartisanalliance.com/2018/04/acceptable-losses-debatable-origins-of.html

Acceptable losses: the debatable origins of loss aversion

Acceptable losses: the debatable origins of loss aversion. Eldad Yechiam. Psychological Research, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00426-018-1013-8

Abstract: It is often claimed that negative events carry a larger weight than positive events. Loss aversion is the manifestation of this argument in monetary outcomes. In this review, we examine early studies of the utility function of gains and losses, and in particular the original evidence for loss aversion reported by Kahneman and Tversky (Econometrica  47:263–291, 1979). We suggest that loss aversion proponents have over-interpreted these findings. Specifically, the early studies of utility functions have shown that while very large losses are overweighted, smaller losses are often not. In addition, the findings of some of these studies have been systematically misrepresented to reflect loss aversion, though they did not find it. These findings shed light both on the inability of modern studies to reproduce loss aversion as well as a second literature arguing strongly for it.