Tuesday, February 4, 2020

Why liberal white women pay a lot of money to learn over dinner how they're racist: A growing number of women are paying to confront their privilege – and racism – at dinners that cost $2,500


Why liberal white women pay a lot of money to learn over dinner how they're racist.  Poppy Noor. The Guardian, Feb 3 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/03/race-to-dinner-party-racism-women

A growing number of women are paying to confront their privilege – and racism – at dinners that cost $2,500

Freshly made pasta is drying on the wooden bannisters lining the hall of a beautiful home in Denver, Colorado. Fox-hunting photos decorate the walls in a room full of books. A fire is burning. And downstairs, a group of liberal white women have gathered around a long wooden table to admit how racist they are.

“Recently, I have been driving around, seeing a black person, and having an assumption that they are up to no good,” says Alison Gubser. “Immediately after I am like, that’s no good! This is a human, just doing their thing. Why do I think that?”

This is Race to Dinner. A white woman volunteers to host a dinner in her home for seven other white women – often strangers, perhaps acquaintances. (Each dinner costs $2,500, which can be covered by a generous host or divided among guests.) A frank discussion is led by co-founders Regina Jackson, who is black, and Saira Rao, who identifies as Indian American. They started Race to Dinner to challenge liberal white women to accept their racism, however subconscious. “If you did this in a conference room, they’d leave,” Rao says. “But wealthy white women have been taught never to leave the dinner table.”

Rao and Jackson believe white, liberal women are the most receptive audience because they are open to changing their behavior. They don’t bother with the 53% of white women who voted for Trump. White men, they feel, are similarly a lost cause. “White men are never going to change anything. If they were, they would have done it by now,” Jackson says.

White women, on the other hand, are uniquely placed to challenge racism because of their proximity to power and wealth, Jackson says. “If they don’t hold these positions themselves, the white men in power are often their family, friends and partners.”

It seems unlikely anyone would voluntarily go to a dinner party in which they’d be asked, one by one, “What was a racist thing you did recently?” by two women of color, before appetizers are served. But Jackson and Rao have hardly been able to take a break since they started these dinners in the spring of 2019. So far, 15 dinners have been held in big cities across the US.

The women who sign up for these dinners are not who most would see as racist. They are well-read and well-meaning. They are mostly Democrats. Some have adopted black children, many have partners who are people of color, some have been doing work towards inclusivity and diversity for decades. But they acknowledge they also have unchecked biases. They are there because they “know [they] are part of the problem, and want to be part of the solution,” as host Jess Campbell-Swanson says before dinner starts.

Campbell-Swanson comes across as an overly keen college student applying for a prestigious internship. She can go on for days about her work as a political consultant, but when it comes to talking about racism, she chokes.

“I want to hire people of color. Not because I want to be … a white savior. I have explored my need for validation … I’m working through that … Yeah. Um … I’m struggling,” she stutters, before finally giving up.

Across from Campbell-Swanson, Morgan Richards admits she recently did nothing when someone patronizingly commended her for adopting her two black children, as though she had saved them. “What I went through to be a mother, I didn’t care if they were black,” she says, opening a window for Rao to challenge her: “So, you admit it is stooping low to adopt a black child?” And Richards accepts that the undertone of her statement is racist.

As more confessions like this are revealed, Rao and Jackson seem to press those they think can take it, while empathizing with those who can’t. “Well done for recognizing that,” Jackson says, to soothe one woman. “We are all part of the problem. We have to get comfortable with that to become part of the solution.”

Carbonara is heaped on to plates, and a sense of self-righteousness seems to wash over the eight white women. They’ve shown up, admitted their wrongdoing and are willing to change. Don’t they deserve a little pat on the back?

Erika Righter raises her tattooed forearm to her face, in despair of all of the racism she’s witnessed as a social worker, then laments how a white friend always ends phone calls with “Love you long time”.

“And what is your racism, Erika?” Rao interrupts, refusing to let her off the hook. The mood becomes tense. Another woman adds: “I don’t know you, Erika. But you strike me as being really in your head. Everything I’m hearing is from the neck up.”

Righter, a single mother, retreats before defending herself: “I haven’t read all the books. I’m new to this.”

A lot of people hate Saira Rao.

“The American flag makes me sick,” read a recent tweet of hers. Another: “White folks – before telling me that your Indian husband or wife or friend or colleague doesn’t agree with anything I say about racism or thinks I’m crazy, please Google ‘token,’ ‘internalized oppression’ and ‘gaslighting’.”

She wasn’t always this confrontational, she says. Her “awakening” began recently.

After Rao’s mother died unexpectedly a few years ago, she moved to Denver from New York to be around her best friends – a group of mostly white women from college. She wasn’t new to being the only person of color, but she was surprised to notice how they would distance themselves whenever she’d talk frankly about race.

Then, fuelled by anger at Trump’s election after she’d campaigned tirelessly for Hillary Clinton, Rao ran for Congress in 2018 against a Democratic incumbent on an anti-racist manifesto, and criticized the “pink-pussy-hat-wearing” women of the Democratic party. It was during this campaign Rao met Jackson, who works in real estate. Jackson recalls her initial impressions of Rao as “honest, and willing to call a thing a thing”.

It’s that brashness that led to Race for Dinner. Rao is done with affability. “I’d spent years trying to get through to white women with coffees and teas – massaging them, dealing with their tears, and I got nowhere. I thought, if nothing is going to work, let’s try to shake them awake.”

The genesis of Race to Dinner wasn’t straightforward. Months after a dinner discussion about race with a white friend of Jackson’s went south, Rao bumped into that friend, who had started reading Reni Eddo-Lodge’s Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race.

“She told me that the dinner had changed everything for her, and asked if we could do another,” says Rao. The friend invited other guests, Rao reluctantly agreed, then hated that second dinner, too. But then white women began flooding her inbox asking her to do it again.

In the beginning, Rao’s dinner-party tone was much more argumentative. But it left her looking less like a human and more like some kind of real-life trolling bot. Women at the dinners were always crying. Some of those dinners got out of hand – attendees have tried to place their hands on Jackson and Rao, and racial slurs have been thrown around.

“My blood pressure went up. I’d work myself up into a frenzy at every dinner. I realized [that] if I walk away feeling I am going to have a stroke, we should try a different tactic,” Rao says.

Susan Brown attended one of those earlier dinners. She says she felt like Rao and Jackson were angry at her the whole time, without ever learning why. She found Rao needlessly provocative and mean-spirited, unaware of her own class privilege, and divisive. She felt the dinner set her up to fail.

Another previous attendee, who did not want to be named, says she found Rao to be dogmatic, and presented a distorted depiction of history, leaving out facts that do not fit her narrative. At one point, she referred to Rao as “the Trump of the alt-left”.

But even for those who complained, something has changed. Brown read White Fragility – a book released last year that posits every person partakes to some degree in racism and needs to confront that – and realized many of the things she was commending herself for needed to be re-evaluated. The book is now assigned reading for women before they can attend a dinner.

The woman who compared Rao to Trump went to a city council meeting to speak up about the death of a young black man in her area. She attributes that specifically to Jackson’s call for solidarity.

In recent months, Jackson and Rao changed the model. They didn’t want to just have women rely on them to shout at them for being racist and then go home.

“We began to expect more of them,” says Rao. That meant asking the women to speak up. To own their racism. It meant getting them to do the required reading, as well as follow-up discussions, where they decide how to do better anti-racist work.

In the conversation that followed the dinner, Campbell-Swanson, who couldn’t get her racist thoughts out, committed to writing a journal, jotting down daily decisions or thoughts that could be considered racist, and think about how to approach them differently.
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Lisa Bond, who was hired because Rao and Jackson thought there would be instances when participants would feel more comfortable expressing their feelings to another white woman, says this will help her see how unmonitored thoughts can lead to systemic racism. “If our ability to spot these things increases, our ability to challenge it will increase,” says Bond.

Bond says about 65% of participants engage meaningfully in post-dinner conversations with her. But weren’t these women already doing the work? Don’t they want to speak to those women who have no intention of challenging themselves?

“There are so many people worse than us,” says Bond. “I have gotten to the point where I no longer try to pay attention to what someone else is doing. I don’t talk about the 53% [who voted for Trump] because I’m not one of them.”

What is in her power, she says, is forcing herself to talk to her sister, who did vote for Trump, even when it gets difficult. She emphasizes this work has to continue, no matter who is president.

“If Trump were impeached tomorrow and we got a new president, a lot of white liberal people will go back to living their lives just as before, and that’s what we have to prevent,” she says. “All that’s happened is we can see racism now, while before we could cover it up. That’s why we need these dinners. So when we get a new person in and racism is not as obvious, we won’t just crawl back to being comfortable.”

Japan now plans to build as many as 22 new coal-burning power plants at 17 different sites in the next five years

Japan Races to Build New Coal-Burning Power Plants, Despite the Climate Risks. Hiroko Tabuchi. The New York Times, Feb. 3, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/03/climate/japan-coal-fukushima.html

Just beyond the windows of Satsuki Kanno’s apartment overlooking Tokyo Bay, a behemoth from a bygone era will soon rise: a coal-burning power plant, part of a buildup of coal power that is unheard-of for an advanced economy.

It is one unintended consequence of the Fukushima nuclear disaster almost a decade ago, which forced Japan to all but close its nuclear power program. Japan now plans to build as many as 22 new coal-burning power plants — one of the dirtiest sources of electricity — at 17 different sites in the next five years, just at a time when the world needs to slash carbon dioxide emissions to fight global warming.

“Why coal, why now?” said Ms. Kanno, a homemaker in Yokosuka, the site for two of the coal-burning units that will be built just several hundred feet from her home. “It’s the worst possible thing they could build.”

Together the 22 power plants would emit almost as much carbon dioxide annually as all the passenger cars sold each year in the United States. The construction stands in contrast with Japan’s effort to portray this summer’s Olympic Games in Tokyo as one of the greenest ever.

The Yokosuka project has prompted unusual pushback in Japan, where environmental groups more typically focus their objections on nuclear power. But some local residents are suing the government over its approval of the new coal-burning plant in what supporters hope will jump-start opposition to coal in Japan.

The Japanese government, the plaintiffs say, rubber-stamped the project without a proper environmental assessment. The complaint is noteworthy because it argues that the plant will not only degrade local air quality, but will also endanger communities by contributing to climate change.

Carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere is the major driver of global warming, because it traps the sun’s heat. Coal burning is one of the biggest single sources of carbon dioxide emissions.

Japan is already experiencing severe effects from climate change. Scientists have said that a heat wave in 2018 that killed more than 1,000 people could not have happened without climate change.  Because of heat concerns, the International Olympic Committee was compelled to move the Tokyo Olympics’ marathon events to a cooler city almost 700 miles north.

Japan has used the Olympics to underscore its transition to a more climate-resilient economy, showing off innovations like roads that reflect heat. Organizers have said electricity for the Games will come from renewable sources.

Coal investments threaten to undermine that message.

Under the Paris accord, Japan committed to rein in its greenhouse gas emissions by 26 percent by 2030 compared to 2013 levels, a target that has been criticized for being “highly insufficient” by climate groups.

“Japan touts a low-emissions Olympics, but in the very same year, it will start operating five new coal-fired power plants that will emit many times more carbon dioxide than anything the Olympics can offset,” said Kimiko Hirata, international director at the Kiko Network, a group that advocates climate action.

Japan’s policy sets it apart from other developed economies. Britain, the birthplace of the industrial revolution, is set to phase out coal power by 2025, and France has said it will shut down its coal power plants even earlier, by 2022. In the United States, utilities are rapidly retiring coal power and no new plants are actively under development.

But Japan relies on coal for more than a third of its power generation needs. And while older coal plants will start retiring, eventually reducing overall coal dependency, the country still expects to meet more than a quarter of its electricity needs from coal in 2030.

“Japan is an anomaly among developed economies,” said Yukari Takamura, an expert in climate policy at the Institute for Future Initiatives at the University of Tokyo. “The era of coal is ending, but for Japan, it’s proving very difficult to give up an energy source that it has relied on for so long.”

Japan’s appetite for coal doesn’t solely come down to Fukushima. Coal consumption has been rising for decades, as the energy-poor country, which is reliant on imports for the bulk of its energy needs, raced to wean itself from foreign oil following the oil shocks of the 1970s.

Fukushima, though, presented another type of energy crisis, and more reason to keep investing in coal. And even as the economics of coal have started to crumble — research has shown that as soon as 2025 it could become more cost-effective for Japanese operators to invest in renewable energy, such as wind or solar, than to run coal plants — the government has stood by the belief that the country’s utilities must keep investing in fossil fuels to maintain a diversified mix of energy sources.

Together with natural gas and oil, fossil fuels account for about four-fifths of Japan’s electricity needs, while renewable sources of energy, led by hydropower, make up about 16 percent. Reliance on nuclear energy, which once provided up to a third of Japan’s power generation, plummeted to 3 percent in 2017.

The Japanese government’s policy of financing coal power in developing nations, alongside China and South Korea, has also come under scrutiny. The country is second only to China in the financing of coal plants overseas.

At the United Nations climate talks late last year in Madrid, attended by a sizable Japanese contingent, activists in yellow “Pikachu” outfits unfurled “No Coal” signs and chanted “Sayonara coal!”

A target of the activists’ wrath has been Japan’s new environment minister, Shinjiro Koizumi, a charismatic son of a former prime minister who is seen as a possible future candidate for prime minister himself. But Mr. Koizumi has fallen short of his predecessor, Yoshiaki Harada, who had declared that the Environment Ministry would not approve the construction of any more new large coal-fired power plants, but lasted less than a year as minister.

Mr. Koizumi has shied away from such explicit promises in favor of more general assurances that Japan will eventually roll back coal use. “While we can’t declare an exit from coal straight away,” Mr. Koizumi said at a briefing in Tokyo last month, the nation “had made it clear that it will move steadily toward making renewables its main source of energy.”

The Yokosuka project has special significance for Mr. Koizumi, who hails from the port city, an industrial hub and the site of an American naval base. The coal units are planned at the site of an oil-powered power station, operated by Tokyo Electric Power, that shuttered in 2009, to the relief of local residents.

But that shutdown proved to be short-lived.

Just two years later, the Fukushima disaster struck, when an earthquake and tsunami badly damaged a seaside nuclear facility also owned by Tokyo Electric. The resulting meltdown sent the utility racing to start up two of the eight Yokosuka oil-powered units as an emergency measure. They were finally shut down only in 2017.

What Tokyo Electric proposed next — the two new coal-powered units — has left many in the community bewildered. To make matters worse, Tokyo Electric declared that the units did not need a full environmental review, because they were being built on the same site as the oil-burning facilities.

The central government agreed. The residents’ lawsuit challenges that decision.

Some new coal projects have faced hiccups. Last year, a consortium of energy companies canceled plans for two coal-burning plants, saying they were no longer economical. Meanwhile, Japan has said it will invest in carbon capture and storage technology to clean up emissions from coal generation, but that technology is not yet commercially available.

Coal’s fate in Japan may reside with the country’s Ministry of Trade, which pulls considerable weight in Tokyo’s halls of power. In a response to questions about the coal-plant construction, the ministry said it had issued guidance to the nation’s operators to wind down their least-efficient coal plants and to aim for carbon-emissions reductions overall. But the decision on whether to go ahead with plans rested with the operators, it said.

“The most responsible policy,” the ministry said, “is to forge a concrete path that allows for both energy security, and a battle against climate change.”

Local residents say the ministry’s position falls short. Tetsuya Komatsubara, 77, has operated a pair of small fishing boats out of Yokosuka for six decades, diving for giant clams, once abundant in waters off Tokyo.

Scientists have registered a rise in the temperature of waters off Tokyo of more than 1 degree Celsius over the past decade, which is wreaking havoc with fish stocks there.

Mr. Komatsubara can feel the rise in water temperatures on his skin, he said, and was worried the new plants would be another blow to a fishing business already on the decline. “They say temperatures are rising. We’ve known that for a long time,” Mr. Komatsubara said. “It’s time to do something about that.”

Written erotica 2000-2016: As in video, found no meaningful increase in either the amount of content with violence, family (incest), or BDSM themes or popularity of any of the three transgressive themes within the erotic narratives

Change in the Popularity of Transgressive Content in Written Erotica between 2000 and 2016. Martin Seehuus, Ariel B. Handy & Amelia M. Stanton. The Journal of Sex Research, Feb 3 2020. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224499.2020.1716206

ABSTRACT: There is a widely held belief that the amount and intensity of transgressive content in pornography have been rising. Reliably assessing for such an increase, however, is complicated by methodological factors including hand-coding content using conflicting a priori definitions of what constitutes transgressive content. In response to those limitations, the present study used the results of a published empirical content analysis of ~250,000 erotic stories written over 16 years to determine if the amount or popularity of transgressive content (stories high in the themes of violence, family (incest), or BDSM) has changed in that timeframe. Results from the present study indicated no meaningful increase in either the amount of content with those themes or popularity (as measured by story views per day) of any of the three transgressive themes within the erotic narratives over the 16-year period of analysis. These results, in addition to recent research presenting similar findings within pornographic video, do not support popular perceptions that erotic material is becoming increasingly transgressive. Rather, such content within internet-based erotic material, and particularly erotic narratives, appears to be relatively consistent.

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A primary concern some hold about violent or transgressive
content within erotic material is that consuming such
content may increase the perpetration of sexual violence (for
a comprehensive discussion, see Shor & Seida, 2019). This is
a valid concern. If this were the case, our data and the work of
others would suggest that the rate of sexual violence should be
relatively stable over time. However, a review of US governmental
statistics on violence against women (both reported
and unreported to law enforcement) shows a decline from
a peak rate of 5.0 acts of sexual violence per 1,000 women in
1994 to 1.8 acts of sexual violence per 1,000 women in 2010
(Planty, Langton, Krebs, Berzofsky, & Smiley-McDonald,
2013). This decline, combined with data indicating an increase
in overall viewership of pornography over approximately the
same time period (Gorman et al., 2010; Klaassen & Peter,
2015; Price et al., 2016; Wright et al., 2016), suggests that,
on the macro level, pornography viewership may have no
effect (or even a protective effect, as per Fisher et al., 2013)
on violence. Alternatively, any effect of violent pornography
on sexual violence may have been countered by other societal
forces.

Most interestingly, vegetarian eaters’ approach bias towards non-vegetarian food pictures also did not differ from that of the omnivorous group, despite vegetarians rating those pictures as much less pleasant

Fearing the wurst: Robust approach bias towards non-vegetarian food images in a sample of young female vegetarian eaters. Helen C. Knight, Sarah Mowat, Constanze Hesse. Appetite, February 4 2020, 104617. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.appet.2020.104617

Abstract: Previous studies have shown that humans show an implicit approach bias toward food related items which is moderated by hunger and properties of the food items displayed (such as their palatability and calorie content). However, little is known about if and how this approach bias is moderated by food preferences and/or diet choices. In this study, we compared approach-avoidance biases in a group of young female omnivore and vegetarian eaters towards images of vegetarian and non-vegetarian food items using a manikin stimulus-response compatibility task. While vegetarian eaters showed a slightly larger approach bias for vegetarian than for non-vegetarian food stimuli, this bias was of similar size to that observed in the omnivorous group. Most interestingly, vegetarian eaters’ approach bias towards non-vegetarian food pictures also did not differ from that of the omnivorous group, despite vegetarians rating those pictures as much less pleasant. Our findings suggest that approach biases towards food items are quite robust and do not rapidly change with dietary practice. However, despite approach biases often guiding behaviour, vegetarian eaters successfully withstand these implicit action tendencies and avoid non-vegetarian produce. Potential implications of this finding for the addiction literature are discussed.

Hyper-realistic Face Masks in a Live Passport-Checking Task: The masks went undetected during live identity checks in large numbers

Hyper-realistic Face Masks in a Live Passport-Checking Task. David J. Robertson. Perception, February 3, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1177/0301006620904614

Abstract: Hyper-realistic face masks have been used as disguises in at least one border crossing and in numerous criminal cases. Experimental tests using these masks have shown that viewers accept them as real faces under a range of conditions. Here, we tested mask detection in a live identity verification task. Fifty-four visitors at the London Science Museum viewed a mask wearer at close range (2 m) as part of a mock passport check. They then answered a series of questions designed to assess mask detection, while the masked traveller was still in view. In the identity matching task, 8% of viewers accepted the mask as matching a real photo of someone else, and 82% accepted the match between masked person and masked photo. When asked if there was any reason to detain the traveller, only 13% of viewers mentioned a mask. A further 11% picked disguise from a list of suggested reasons. Even after reading about mask-related fraud, 10% of viewers judged that the traveller was not wearing a mask. Overall, mask detection was poor and was not predicted by unfamiliar face matching performance. We conclude that hyper-realistic face masks could go undetected during live identity checks.

Keywords: masks, silicone, realistic, face perception, face recognition, passports, identification, fraud, deception

They formulate a plausible evolutionary function, the sexual exploitation hypothesis: Psychopathy exhibits “special design” features for subverting female mate choice, facilitating the induction of favorable impressions & sexual desire

Psychopathy and the Induction of Desire: Formulating and Testing an Evolutionary Hypothesis. Kristopher J. Brazil & Adelle E. Forth. Evolutionary Psychological Science 6, pages 64–81 (2020). https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40806-019-00213-0

Abstract: The problems psychopathic individuals impose on society and in their interpersonal relationships can be held in stark contrast to reports of their appeal and sexual success in some of those relationships. In the current paper, we seek to contextualize this enigma by focusing on the interpersonal dynamics of psychopathic individuals in romantic encounters. We first formulate a plausible evolutionary function, the sexual exploitation hypothesis, that proposes psychopathy exhibits “special design” features for subverting female mate choice, facilitating the induction of favorable impressions and desire in prospective intimate relationships. We then test the hypothesis in two studies with university samples. Study 1 had young men assessed on psychopathy, social intelligence, and sociosexuality engage in a filmed dating interaction. Study 2 had young women view a subsample of the videos, rate them on desirability, and leave voice messages. Results show psychopathy was related to sociosexuality, specific factors of social intelligence, and generating higher desirability ratings from women after controlling for men’s physical attractiveness. Analyses involving comparisons of two men showed women’s ratings increased in favor of the more psychopathic man. Women’s voice pitch also changed, but only in response to different facets of psychopathy. The results provide preliminary support for the sexual exploitation hypothesis and suggest that more dynamic assessment of putative desirability in psychopathy may be required to capture its plausible special design features in prospective dating encounters.



Inequality aversion and altruistic concerns play an important role for redistributive voting that is particularly pronounced for above-median income earners

Other-regarding Preferences and Redistributive Politics. Thomas Epper, Ernst Fehr and Julien Senn (2020), Working paper series / Department of Economics Working Paper No. 339. https://www.econ.uzh.ch/static/release/workingpapers.php?id=1018

Abstract: Increasing inequality and associated egalitarian sentiments have again put redistribution on the political agenda. Support for redistribution may also be affected by altruistic and egalitarian preferences, but knowledge about the distribution of these preferences in the broader population and how they relate to political support for redistributive policies is still scarce. In this paper, we take advantage of Swiss direct democracy, where people voted several times in national plebiscites on strongly redistributive policies, to study the link between other-regarding preferences and support for redistribution in a broad sample of the Swiss population. Based on a recently developed non-parametric clustering procedure, we identify three disjunct groups of individuals with fundamentally different other-regarding preferences: (i) a large share of inequality averse people, (ii) a somewhat smaller yet still large share of people with an altruistic concern for social welfare and the worse off, and (iii) a considerable minority of primarily selfish individuals. Controlling for a large number of determinants of support for redistribution, we document that inequality aversion and altruistic concerns play an important role for redistributive voting that is particularly pronounced for above-median income earners. However, the role of these motives differs depending on the nature of redistributive proposals. Inequality aversion has large and robust effects in plebiscites that demand income reductions for the rich, while altruistic concerns play no significant role in these plebiscites.

Keywords: Social preferences, altruism, inequality aversion, preference heterogeneity, demand for redistribution
JEL Classification: D31, D72, H23, H24


inequality averse individuals (comprising 50% of our population), individuals with altruistic concerns about social welfare and those worse off( 35%) and predominantly selfish individuals ( 15%)


5 Summary and conclusions

Rising inequality in advanced capitalist countries has again put the issue of redistribution on
the political agenda. In this paper, we examined the role of other-regarding preferences for
individuals’ support for redistribution – a question that has so far received relatively scarce
attention in the political economy literature. To answer this question, we took advantage of
Swiss direct democracy where 4 radically redistributive proposals were put to vote in national
plebiscites during the last 10 years. This enabled us to measure people’s support for policy
proposals that were actually put to vote instead of using more general hypothetical questions
related to demand for redistribution.
Previous research suggests that other-regarding preference may have multiple facets –
i.e., individuals may not simply differ in their degree of “other-regardingness”, but that there
may be qualitatively distinct, and in some sense fundamentally incompatible, types of otherregarding
preferences. In our context, this incompatibility concerns, for example, the extent
to which other-regarding individuals are willing to sacrifice their own payoff for the sake of
achieving equality by reducing richer people’s income. Therefore, the first task is to identify
which fundamentally distinct social preference types exist in the broader population and to
assess their quantitative importance.
For this purpose, we designed an experiment that enables us to identify the existence
of distinct social preference types and their quantitative importance in a broad sample of
the Swiss population. Applying a novel Bayesian non-parametric clustering method to the
data of this experiment, we uncover three fundamentally distinct social preference types with
a clear behavioral interpretation: inequality averse individuals (comprising 50% of our
population), individuals with altruistic concerns about social welfare and those worse off
( 35%) and predominantly selfish individuals ( 15%). Interestingly, the individual-level
behavioral variation within types is generally relatively low but within the social welfare type
there are two meaningful subgroups – a strong type that puts more weight on helping those
who are worse off, and a moderate type that puts more weight on joint payoffs.
We link individuals’ type of social preference with their political support for redistribution
and show that both types of other-regarding preference are associated with a significantly
higher support for redistribution compared to the predominantly selfish type. This
association is robust to controlling for additional covariates which includes a large battery of
socio-demographic variables and other important determinants of demand for redistribution
that were previously discussed in the literature. Even after controlling for individuals’ political
identity, other-regarding preferences remain strongly associated with political support
for redistribution. In addition, we also show that social preferences are particularly strong
predictors of support for redistribution among individuals with an income above the median.
Inequality averse above-median income earners are 20 percentage points more likely
to support redistribution than predominantly selfish individuals. Similarly, above-median
income earners with a social welfare concern are 13 percentage points more likely to support
redistribution compared to predominantly selfish individuals. In contrast, for below-median
income earners the discernible effect of social preferences is strongly diluted. Finally, the
identification of two quantitatively important social preference types enables us to examine
their potentially differential role for different types of redistributive policies. It turns out that
inequality averse individuals are substantially more likely to support policies that “reduce the
income of the rich” than those with an altruistic concern for social welfare, while the latter
appear to be (slightly) more supportive of policies that “help the worse off”.
Altogether, these results suggest that one can gain interesting new insights into the political
economy of support for redistribution by taking other-regarding preferences – and the
variety thereof – into account. We therefore believe that the future research in this domain
would benefit from routinely measuring other-regarding preferences like inequality aversion
and concerns for social welfare. To make this possible, we provide a simplified version of our
experimental tool which allows the identification of the different social preference types with
only 5 different budget lines. We hope that this simplified tool will facilitate the application
of the methods used in this paper to examine the distribution of other-regarding preferences
in many more contexts including other cultures, countries and other types of redistributive
policies.

Sentencers prefer certain numbers when meting out sentence lengths (in custody and community service) and amounts (for fines/compensation)

Criminal Sentencing by Preferred Numbers. Mandeep K. Dhami et al. Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, February 3 2020. https://doi.org/10.1111/jels.12246

Abstract: Criminal sentencing is a complex cognitive activity often performed by the unaided mind under suboptimal conditions. As such, sentencers may not behave according to policy, guidelines, or training. We analyzed the distribution of sentences meted out in one year in two different jurisdictions (i.e., England and Wales, and New South Wales, Australia). We reveal that sentencers prefer certain numbers when meting out sentence lengths (in custody and community service) and amounts (for fines/compensation). These “common doses” accounted for over 90 percent of sentences in each jurisdiction. The size of these doses increased as sentences became more severe, and doses followed a logarithmic pattern. Our findings are compatible with psychological research on preferred numbers and are reminiscent of Weber's and Fechner's laws. The findings run contrary to arguments against efforts to reduce judicial discretion, and potentially undermine the notion of individualized justice, as well as raise questions about the (cost) effectiveness of sentencing.

Physically attractive faces attract us physically; effect is greater with males

Physically attractive faces attract us physically. Robin S.S. Kramer et al. Cognition, Volume 198, May 2020, 104193. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104193

Abstract: When interacting with other humans, facial expressions provide valuable information for approach or avoid decisions. Here, we consider facial attractiveness as another important dimension upon which approach-avoidance behaviours may be based. In Experiments 1–3, we measured participants' responses to attractive and unattractive women's faces in an approach-avoidance paradigm in which there was no explicit instruction to evaluate facial attractiveness or any other stimulus attribute. Attractive faces were selected more often, a bias that may be sensitive to response outcomes and was reduced when the faces were inverted. Experiment 4 explored an entirely implicit measure of approach, with participants passively viewing single faces while standing on a force platform. We found greater lean towards attractive faces, with this pattern being most obvious in male participants. Taken together, these results demonstrate that attractiveness activates approach-avoidance tendencies, even in the absence of any task demand.



How Firm Are the Foundations of Mind-Set Theory? The Claims Appear Stronger Than the Evidence

How Firm Are the Foundations of Mind-Set Theory? The Claims Appear Stronger Than the Evidence. Alexander P. Burgoyne, David Z. Hambrick, Brooke N. Macnamara. Psychological Science, February 3, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797619897588

Abstract: Mind-set refers to people’s beliefs about whether attributes are malleable (growth mind-set) or unchangeable ( fixed mind-set). Proponents of mind-set theory have made bold claims about mind-set’s importance. For example, one’s mind-set is described as having profound effects on one’s motivation and achievements, creating different psychological worlds for people, and forming the core of people’s meaning systems. We examined the evidentiary strength of six key premises of mind-set theory in 438 participants; we reasoned that strongly worded claims should be supported by equally strong evidence. However, no support was found for most premises. All associations (rs) were significantly weaker than .20. Other achievement-motivation constructs, such as self-efficacy and need for achievement, have been found to correlate much more strongly with presumed associates of mind-set. The strongest association with mind-set (r = −.12) was opposite from the predicted direction. The results suggest that the foundations of mind-set theory are not firm and that bold claims about mind-set appear to be overstated.

Keywords: mind-set theory, implicit theories, growth mind-set, fixed mind-set, achievement, open data, open materials, preregistered


Monday, February 3, 2020

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

Echo Chambers Exist! (But They're Full of Opposing Views). Jonathan Bright, Nahema Marchal, Bharath Ganesh, Stevan Rudinac. arXiv Jan 30 2020. arXiv:2001.11461

Abstract: The theory of echo chambers, which suggests that online political discussions take place in conditions of ideological homogeneity, has recently gained popularity as an explanation for patterns of political polarization and radicalization observed in many democratic countries. However, while micro-level experimental work has shown evidence that individuals may gravitate towards information that supports their beliefs, recent macro-level studies have cast doubt on whether this tendency generates echo chambers in practice, instead suggesting that cross-cutting exposures are a common feature of digital life. In this article, we offer an explanation for these diverging results. Building on cognitive dissonance theory, and making use of observational trace data taken from an online white nationalist website, we explore how individuals in an ideological 'echo chamber' engage with opposing viewpoints. We show that this type of exposure, far from being detrimental to radical online discussions, is actually a core feature of such spaces that encourages people to stay engaged. The most common 'echoes' in this echo chamber are in fact the sound of opposing viewpoints being undermined and marginalized. Hence echo chambers exist not only in spite of but thanks to the unifying presence of oppositional viewpoints. We conclude with reflections on policy implications of our study for those seeking to promote a more moderate political internet.

Check also The rise in the political polarization in recent decades is not accounted for by the dramatic rise in internet use; claims that partisans inhabit wildly segregated echo chambers/filter bubbles are largely overstated:
Deri, Sebastian. 2019. “Internet Use and Political Polarization: A Review.” PsyArXiv. November 6. https://www.bipartisanalliance.com/2019/11/the-rise-in-political-polarization-in.html

And Testing popular news discourse on the “echo chamber” effect: Does political polarisation occur among those relying on social media as their primary politics news source? Nguyen, A. and Vu, H.T. First Monday, 24 (5), 6. Jun 4 2019. https://www.bipartisanalliance.com/2019/10/testing-popular-news-discourse-on-echo.html

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


Alternative mating tactics in a cannibalistic widow spider: do males prefer the safer option? Lenka Sentenská, Gabriele Uhl, Yael Lubin. Animal Behaviour, Volume 160, February 2020, Pages 53-59. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2019.11.021

Highlights
•    Mating with immature females is an alternative tactic for brown widow males.
•    Adult females cannibalize mating males, but immature females do not.
•    Males approached and preferred to mate with adult females over receptive immatures.
•    Males did not show a preference for unreceptive versus late-stage receptive immatures.
•    Close-range cues in webs of immatures may indicate receptivity.

Abstract: Mating generally occurs with adult females, which undergo a suite of changes in morphology, physiology and behaviour during maturation. In the brown widow spider, Latrodectus geometricus, however, males can mate with immature females during a short period before they moult to the adult stage. Mating with immature females seems beneficial for males, because they are not at risk of being cannibalized, whereas cannibalism inevitably occurs in matings with adult females. We conducted choice experiments to elucidate male preference, courtship and mating behaviour with immature and adult females of different ages. We controlled for age of the females’ webs to provide males with potential web-borne attractants of similar age. We tested whether males distinguish immature females that are ready to mate (late subadult stage) from adult females and from immature females that do not mate (early subadults), and we examined male response to young versus old adult females. Males approached and mated with adult females more frequently than late subadult females, but there were no differences in the frequencies of approach to early and late subadults or to adult females of different ages. Once on the web, however, males attempted to mate with the late subadults. We suggest that web-borne volatile cues, typical of adult females, may be reduced or lacking in late subadult females, yet less volatile cues may indicate receptivity.

Discussion

Male L. geometricus mated with late subadult females, which would seem to be highly advantageous for the male due to the reduced courtship combined with consistently successful copulation with both palps and lack of sexual cannibalism (Biaggio et al., 2016, Waner et al., 2018; this study). However, when we presented males with late subadult and adult females simultaneously, they typically chose adult, cannibalistic females over the noncannibalistic subadult females. Males showed this preference even when we controlled for web age, a confounding factor that might have affected their choice for adult females observed in a previous study (Waner et al., 2018).

Sexual Attractants

Male L. geometricus might not recognize subadult females as potential mates due to a lack of sex pheromone (Waner et al., 2018). For example, Fisher et al. (2018) suggested that subadult females of the false black widow spider, Steatoda grossa, do not produce a sexual-attractant pheromone. However, male widow spiders are often found on webs of subadult females in nature (Y. Lubin, personal observation). Furthermore, males readily approached the subadult females in their webs, when we exposed the males to late subadult females against an empty control and they did so as rapidly as when they approached adult females. These observations suggest that even before the final moult females produce cues that act as sexual attractants by which males recognize subadult females as potential mates.
In our experiments, we found no evidence that the age of adult females influenced the male's response in choice tests, contrary to previous findings (Waner et al., 2018) where males preferred older adult females to young adults and late stage subadults. The result of Waner et al. (2018) was probably due to the presence of a stronger pheromone cue that had accumulated in the older web. We also observed no difference in the male's approach towards late subadult females, which are ready to mate, and early subadult females, which are not. This suggests that males cannot identify from a distance whether the subadult females are ready to mate. However, after contacting their webs, males courted the early subadult females only very briefly and then remained in their webs without any further courting, but males immediately courted and then mated with late subadult females. Thus, our observations agree with other studies on spider chemical communication, which suggest that airborne chemicals provide less specific information than chemicals detected by contact with the web (reviewed in Gaskett, 2007, Uhl, 2013). Similarly, when presented with adult and late subadult females, males seemed to recognize the female stage only upon contacting the web because only then did they begin to add silk when with an adult female or vibrate when with a late subadult female.
The observed preference of males for adult rather than subadult females could be due to quantitative differences in male-attracting signals or to different cues emitted by subadult and adult females. Virgin adult females of many spider species attract males by producing pheromones that signal readiness to mate (Gaskett, 2007, Kasumovic and Andrade, 2004, Riechert and Singer, 1995, Roberts and Uetz, 2005, Stoltz et al., 2007, Uhl, 2013). Subadult mating in L. geometricus occurs during a 4-day period before the final moult (late subadult stage). In general, adults seem to produce more pheromone and thus provide a stronger signal than immature females and often only adults produce pheromones (Gaskett, 2007, Uhl and Elias, 2011, Uhl, 2013, Fischer et al., 2018). Then, the observed preference for adult females represents rather an attraction to a stronger signal than a preference for a certain stage per se. A few pheromones have been chemically characterized for virgin adult females (e.g. in the genus Latrodectus; Jerhot, Stoltz, Andrade, & Schulz, 2010) but none for subadults. Although males often cohabit with subadult females (Jackson, 1986), these females might not produce sex pheromones, and males may identify them by unintentionally produced chemical cues (Fischer, 2019). Therefore, olfactory cues produced by subadult females may be qualitatively different from pheromones of adult females, potentially allowing males to differentiate between the two stages. If these chemicals are distinguishable by males, the choice of adult females over late subadults might indicate that the former are perceived as higher-quality mates, even though mating with them limits males to a single copulation and sometimes even to a single insertion (Segoli, Arieli, et al., 2008).

Costs to Males of Mating with Subadult Females

There may be fitness costs to males adopting the subadult mating tactic. After mating, subadult-mated females still have to undergo a final moult to adulthood and may have a lower probability of surviving to oviposition than adult-mated females. The moulting process itself is a sensitive period due to the risk of predation on moulting or freshly moulted spiders, the risk of desiccation or an inability to release the old cuticle (e.g. Horner and Starks, 1972, Jones, 1941, Tanaka, 1984). Thus, males may prefer to mate with adult females due to the overall greater probability of successful reproduction.
Costs of mating with late subadult females could also arise from the specific mating behaviour and the mechanisms of copulation, sperm transfer and sperm storage. When mating with subadult females, L. geometricus males do not somersault and are not cannibalized. In the congener L. hasselti, cannibalism reduces the likelihood of a female remating (Andrade, 1996). Thus, the lack of cannibalism might lead to a greater probability of remating in subadult-mated females and consequently to paternity loss for the first male. Furthermore, during courtship with adult females, the male removes a large part of the female's web and adds his own silk. Webs of adult female L. hasselti that were thus altered by males attracted fewer suitors (Scott, Kirk, McCann, & Gries, 2015), a phenomenon observed also in other web-building species (reviewed in Scott, Anderson, & Andrade, 2018). By contrast, we showed here that webs of subadult-mated females were not altered by the male; male courtship was brief, the web remained intact and the male added little silk. A subsequent male might thus have no indication of a previous visitor. It is unclear whether subadult-mated females remain attractive to males and whether these females will remate after maturing to adults (Biaggio et al., 2016, Waner et al., 2019). Finally, although mating with a subadult female enables the male to seek an additional female, high mortality during mate search (more than 80% of L. hasselti males die without finding a mate; Andrade, 2003) may reduce the benefit of such matings.
A male mating with subadult females may have lower paternity than expected for the first male in adult matings due to unfavourable sperm storage conditions or incorrect placement of sperm in the subadult female spermathecae, or to lower competitive ability of his sperm against a second male's sperm. If the internal genitalia of late subadult females are not fully developed, sperm storage conditions may differ from those in adult females and might result in a lower paternity share for a male's sperm when competing with ejaculates of other males. It is possible that the mating plugs cannot be placed correctly or can shift when subadult females moult and thus may be a less effective barrier to remating. Additionally, the lack of somersaulting while mating with late subadult females may mechanically alter the insertion mechanism and affect where sperm is deposited within the female's reproductive tract. The location of deposited sperm and the storage conditions, together with potentially insufficient plugging in subadult matings, may yield lower reproductive success. In the congener, L. hasselti, the first of two males mating with an adult female achieves approximately 80% paternity (Snow & Andrade, 2005). However, the paternity share may differ if a subsequent male inseminates a female mated as subadult after she has moulted. These potential costs of mating with a subadult female can be revealed through paternity assessments in double-mating trials.
Our observation showed that L. geometricus males mate with late subadult females, but do not attempt to do so with younger subadults. Despite this, they did not show any preference for late over early subadult females. Cohabiting with subadult females and then mating with them when they moult is known for many spider species (Jackson, 1986) including the widow spiders (Biaggio et al., 2016, Segoli et al., 2006). Although in L. hasselti and L. geometricus the encounter with late subadult females often leads to immediate mating, cohabiting with early subadult females and waiting for them to mature may be another mating tactic in a male's repertoire. Additionally, it is likely that males cannot determine from a distance subadult females' readiness to mate.

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

Ownership, Learning, and Beliefs. Samuel M. Hartzmark Samuel Hirshmany Alex Imasz. November 2019. https://fraconference.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/ownership_learning_beliefs.pdf

Abstract: We examine how owning a good affects learning and beliefs about its quality. We show that people have more extreme reactions to information about a good that they own compared to the same information about a non-owned good: ownership causes more optimistic beliefs after receiving a positive signal and more pessimistic beliefs after receiving a negative signal. This effect on beliefs impacts the valuation gap between the minimum owners are willing to accept to part with the good and the maximum non-owners are willing to pay to attain it, i.e. the endowment effect. We show that the endowment effect increases in response to positive information and disappears with negative information. 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. In exploring the mechanism, we find that ownership increases attention to recent signals about owned goods, exacerbating over-extrapolation. We demonstrate a similar relationship between ownership and over-extrapolation in survey data about stock market expectations. Our findings have implications for any setting with trade and scope for learning, and provide a microfoundation for models of disagreement that generate volume in asset markets.

KEYWORDS: biased beliefs, endowment effect, ownership, attention, behavioral economics, learning, extrapolation
JEL Classifications: D9, D12

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

The Politics of Religious Nones. Philip Schwadel. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, February 2 2020. https://doi.org/10.1111/jssr.12640

Abstract: Americans with no religious affiliation (aka religious “Nones”) are not a politically homogeneous community. Just as there are political differences between groups of Christians, there are political differences between groups of religious Nones. I use nationally representative survey data to examine the political activities and perspectives of atheists, agnostics, and those who are “nothing in particular.” Results show that Americans who report that their religion is nothing in particular are relatively uninterested in politics and unlikely to be politically active; atheists are relatively liberal and likely to experience political conflict and follow political news; and agnostics are particularly likely to vote and feel politically isolated from their families. In many ways, the “softer” secularism of those who are nothing in particular is politically more similar to religious affiliates than the “harder” secularism of agnostics and especially atheists. These results have important implications for the future of American politics as Nones now have the potential to rival evangelical Protestants as a politically relevant constituency.

The data used for this study come from Wave 23 of the Pew Research Center's American Trends Panel. The data can be downloaded from the Pew Research Center website: https://www.pewresearch.org/american-trends-panel-datasets/



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

Exposure to half-dressed women and economic behavior. Evelina Bonnier et al. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Volume 168, December 2019, Pages 393-418. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2019.10.017

Highlights
•    We randomize 648 participants of both genders in the lab to advertising images.
•    The images contain either half-dressed women, fully dressed women, or no women.
•    We study the effects on risk taking, willingness to compete and math performance.
•    We find no treatment effects on any outcome measure for women.
•    There is some evidence of men taking more risk after viewing half-dressed women.

Abstract: Images of half-dressed women are ubiquitous in advertising and popular culture. Yet little is known about the potential impacts of such images on economic decision making. We randomize 648 participants of both genders to advertising images including either women in bikini or underwear, fully dressed women, or no women, and examine the effects on risk taking, willingness to compete and math performance in a lab experiment. We find no treatment effects on any outcome measure for women. For men, our results indicate that men take more risk after having been exposed to images of half-dressed women compared to no women.


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)

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: 10.1002/hec.3987

Abstract: We analyze how a sales tax levied on all food products impacts the consumption of healthy food, unhealthy food, and obesity. The sales tax can stimulate the consumption of healthy meals by lowering the time costs of food preparation. Moreover, the sales tax lowers obesity under more general conditions than a tax on unhealthy food (fat tax) and a subsidy on healthy food (thin subsidy). We calibrate the model using recent consumption and time use data from the US. The thin subsidy is counterproductive and increases weight. While both the sales tax and the fat tax mitigate obesity, the former imposes a lower excess burden on consumers.

Keywords: fat tax, obesity, sales tax, thin subsidy
JEL: D11; I12; I18; H31; H51


1  INTRODUCTION
Many countries tax unhealthy foods to address the obesity epidemic: Chile, France, Ireland, Mexico, and the UK among others tax sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs), Finland taxes sweets and non-alcoholic beverages, while Hungary taxes food products with health risks. However, these policies may be ineffective or even counterproductive in reducing obesity, as consumers may substitute to untaxed unhealthy food alternatives (Schroeter, Lusk, & Tyner, 2008). To minimize this problem, governments can broaden the tax base (Finkelstein, Zhen, Nonnemaker, & Todd, 2010; Harding & Lovenheim, 2017; Miao, Beghin, & Jensen, 2013). Therefore, nutrient taxes (such as a sugar tax or a fat tax) are more effective than product taxes (such as a tax on SSBs). This article is the first to propose a sales tax on all food products as an instrument that promotes healthy diets. A sales tax may stimulate healthy consumption by lowering the opportunity cost of cooking time. Moreover, a sales tax imposes a low excess burden on consumers, measured both per kcal reduction in consumption and per dollar of tax revenues. We model a representative consumer in a model akin to that of Yaniv, Rosin, and Tobol (2009) and take explicitly into account the higher opportunity cost in terms of time of healthy consumption. The individual chooses between consumption of healthy and unhealthy food and has a fixed out-of-work time constraint, which she can spend on cooking meals and leisure. The individual consumes unhealthy meals away-from-home (defined as food prepared away-from-home), and their preparation is not time-consuming. Healthy food is produced at home using both time and ingredients.

We show that the sales tax lowers the opportunity cost of time in food preparation and may thus stimulate healthy consumption. If the elasticity of substitution between healthy and unhealthy food is sufficiently high, the sales tax exerts a positive effect on the demand for healthy meals. A tax on unhealthy foods (called for simplicity a fat tax) and a subsidy to healthy consumption (called a thin subsidy) have qualitatively similar effects on the demand for healthy and unhealthy food. Moreover, we show that the policy, which reduces obesity under the least restrictive conditions, is a positive sales tax in the absence of a fat tax and a thin subsidy.
Our model builds on the empirical observation that home-cooked meals are healthier than away-from-home food. Compared to the consumption of away-from-home meals, intake of home-cooked food is associated with higher intake of fiber, iron, and calcium; lower intake of fat, sodium, and cholesterol; lower calorie density (Guthrie, Lin, & Frazao, 2002; Lin & Frazao, 1997; Lin & Frazao, 1999) and lower weight (Chou, Grossman, & Saffer, 2004; French, Harnack, & Jeffery, 2000). Furthermore, a higher frequency of food preparation raises the consumption of fruits and vegetables and lowers the intake of fat, SSBs and fast-food (Larson, Perry, Story, & Neumark-Sztainer, 2006; Laska, Larson, Neumark-Sztainer, & Story, 2012; McLaughlin, Tarasuk, & Kreiger, 2003; Monsivais, Aggarwal, & Drewnowski, 2014; Wolfson & Bleich, 2015b). The positive dietary impact of frequent cooking occurs irrespectively of the weight-loss intentions of individuals (Wolfson & Bleich, 2015a). Kolodinsky and Goldstein (2011) estimate that ten additional minutes of cooking time lower BMI by 0.13 points. Zick, Stevens, and Bryant (2011) find that ten minutes food preparation lower the BMI of women by 0.17 points and do not affect the BMI of men, who, however, are a small share of the meal preparers in their data.

In Section 4, we calibrate the model according to recent U.S. consumption and time allocation data. We estimate the home production function, the dietary characteristics of at-home- and away-from-home-food and the time allocation decisions such that they match data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) 2009-2010 (CDC, 2010) and the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) 2010 (BLS, 2010). The simulated model makes predictions regarding the own- and cross-price elasticities of healthy and unhealthy food that match existing empirical data on these elasticities.

We find in the benchmark case of our simulation that a 10% sales tax lowers away-from-home consumption of men and women by 7.9% and 4.8%, respectively. On the other hand, men's at-home consumption declines by just 0.01% and that of women rises by 0.01%. Hence, the intake of at-home food remains almost unaffected. As a result, men lose 4% of their weight and women 1.8%. On the other hand, a 10% fat tax induces a stronger substitution of at-home for away-from-home consumption. Consequently, it leads to a lower weight decrease. Moreover, the excess burden of the sales tax, measured using the compensating variation, is lower than that of the fat tax, irrespective of whether we calculate the excess burden as the welfare loss per dollar of tax revenues or per reduction in calorie intake. Furthermore, the sales tax's excess burden is also small in absolute value. It equals around 1 − 1.7 cents per dollar of tax revenues and 2 − 2.9 cents per 100 kcal reduction in consumption. Lastly, an introduction of a thin subsidy stimulates strong substitution of healthy for unhealthy food, such that weight slightly increases following the subsidy's implementation. The article from Yaniv et al. (2009) is most related to our paper. They analyze the fat tax and thin subsidy under consideration of the time costs of home-food preparation. Neither policy instrument is unambiguously obesity-reducing because of indeterminate substitution effects on away-from-home food consumption and physical activity.

Bishai (2015) considers the welfare implications of a tax plus subsidy system that raises (lowers) the price of unhealthy (healthy) nutrients but leaves the final product prices unchanged. He shows that such a system may improve welfare.

There is strong empirical evidence that a fat tax does not necessarily reduce weight, because of a possible switch to untaxed alternatives (Chouinard, Davis, LaFrance, & Perloff, 2007; Fletcher, Frisvold, & Tefft, 2010b; Schroeter et al., 2008; Zhen, Finkelstein, Nonnemaker, Karns, & Todd, 2014). Schroeter et al. (2008) estimate that a tax on food-away-from-home and a subsidy on fruit and vegetables may increase obesity. Zhen et al. (2014) show that a tax on SSBs can reduce their consumption at the cost of higher intake of fat and sodium. Furthermore, Fletcher, Frisvold, and Tefft (2010a), Fletcher et al. (2010b) find empirical support that such taxes have a significant effect on SSB consumption, but an insignificant effect on weight. Jeffery, French, Raether, and Baxter (1994) and French et al. (1997) find a significant short-term impact of subsidizing fruits and salads at university and high school cafeteria, which vanishes after the removal of the subsidy. [...]


5 CONCLUSIONS

This paper has compared three different policy instruments, which can be used to address the problem of rising obesity levels: a fat tax (levied on food-away-from-home), a thin subsidy (levied on groceries that enter home food preparation) and a sales tax on all food items. First, we show that a sales tax may stimulate time-intensive healthy consumption by lowering the opportunity cost of time spent on food preparation. Therefore, it may exert a positive effect on the demand for healthy meals. If healthy and unhealthy meals are perfect substitutes, then all three policy instruments have the same qualitative impact on the consumer's demand: they reduce the consumption of unhealthy meals and raise the consumption of healthy food. Second, the policy which reduces obesity under the most general conditions is a sales tax in the absence of the fat tax and the thin subsidy.

A calibration of the model shows that the sales tax mitigates obesity at the lowest welfare cost for consumers. Furthermore, the deadweight cost of the sales tax is small is absolute value. It imposes an excess burden of less than 2 cents per dollar of tax revenues and 3 cents per 100 kcal reduction in the calorie-intake.

Our results open ample opportunities for future research. While this article extends the model of Yaniv et al. (2009) to include a general elasticity of substitution between food at-home and away-from-home and the possibility of non-food purchases, we do not consider the choice of physical exercise. Including it may produce further interesting results on the effects of a sales tax.

Additionally, this article hightlights the role of the price of time in consumption choices. It explains the higher time spent cooking by women through lower opportunity cost of leisure. Gender differences in the price of time are likely caused by the gender wage gap, as documented by Zick et al. (2011). These authors use wage regressions from the March Supplement of the Current Population Survey (CPS) and find the opportunity cost of time for men and women to be 20.57 $∕hour and 16.84 $∕hour, respectively. The gender wage gap is also likely to contribute to unequal distribution of cooking time in non single-adult households. Moreover, closing of the gap is likely to affect this distribution. Hence, more research is necessary to analyze how different opportunity costs of time and the elimination of these differences may affect household production.

Moreover, future work should compare the sales tax to nutrient-specific taxes such as a tax on sugar or fat content. The sales tax may be more efficient in promoting healthy diets as it targets several unhealthy nutrients at once by lowering away-from-home consumption. Furthermore, a comparison to the tax plus subsidy system of Bishai (2015) along the same lines is necessary.

This paper has contributed to the literature by emphasizing the time costs of healthy consumption and showing their importance for the optimal policy design. Future research should focus on analyzing other policies that lower the opportunity cost of home food preparation or provide other incentives for cooking. Two public health programs that have already been implemented in the US are the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) Healthy Incentives Pilot which provides financial incentives for the purchase of fruits and vegetables and the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) Farmer's Market Nutrition program which issues coupons to participants to buy foods from farmers (Smith, Ng, & Popkin, 2013). An evaluation of the effects of these programs on the participants' cooking habits is an important research agenda.

Taxing all food products may be regressive, as poor households spend a larger proportion of their income on food relative to rich households. As a result, an important agenda for future research is to quantify this effect and analyze how governments should spend the tax receipts, such that the tax becomes less regressive. Additionally, it is well-known that a fat tax is also regressive (see, e.g., Chouinard et al. (2007)). Therefore, future work should compare the regressivity of a fat tax to that of a sales tax.

Sunday, February 2, 2020

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

Outsourcing Education: Experimental Evidence from Liberia. Mauricio Romero, Justin Sandefur, and Wayne Aaron Sandholtz. American Economic Review. Feb 2020, Vol. 110, No. 2: Pages 364-400. https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/aer.20181478

Abstract: In 2016, the Liberian government delegated management of 93 randomly selected public schools to private providers. Providers received US$50 per pupil, on top of US$50 per pupil annual expenditure in control schools. After one academic year, students in outsourced schools scored 0.18 σ higher in English and mathematics. We do not find heterogeneity in learning gains or enrollment by student characteristics, but there is significant heterogeneity across providers. While outsourcing appears to be a cost-effective way to use new resources to improve test scores, some providers engaged in unforeseen and potentially harmful behavior, complicating any assessment of welfare gains. (JEL H41, I21, I28, O15)

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Tyler Cowen says (https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/02/the-private-school-experiment-in-liberia.html):
[...] The gains are real, and not the result of student selection.  That said costs are higher with the private contracting.  Better partner selection would have improved the program greatly, though the authors note that some of the most promising partners ex ante ended up being the biggest troublemakers ex post.  Some of the schools, for instance, allowed a possibly unacceptably degree of sexual abuse of the students.  There is perhaps potential for dynamic reoptimization of permissible partners to yield very real gains, though this may or may not be supported by the available political economy incentives.

The authors suggest, by the way, that outsourcing or contracting out to the private sector often does better when quality is relatively simple, such as with water services, food distribution, and simple forms of primary health care, such as immunization.  In their view, for advanced health care and prisons, contracting is less effective, due to the vaguer nature of product quality.

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

Birth order and unwanted fertility. Wanchuan Lin, Juan Pantano, Shuqiao Sun. Journal of Population Economics, April 2020, Volume 33, Issue 2, pp 413–440. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00148-019-00747-4

Abstract: An extensive literature documents the effects of birth order on various individual outcomes, with later-born children faring worse than their siblings. However, the potential mechanisms behind these effects remain poorly understood. This paper leverages US data on pregnancy intention to study the role of unwanted fertility in the observed birth order patterns. We document that children higher in the birth order are much more likely to be unwanted, in the sense that they were conceived at a time when the family was not planning to have additional children. Being an unwanted child is associated with negative life cycle outcomes as it implies a disruption in parental plans for optimal human capital investment. We show that the increasing prevalence of unwantedness across birth order explains a substantial part of the documented birth order effects in education and employment. Consistent with this mechanism, we document no birth order effects in families who have more control over their own fertility.

Keywords: Birth order Unwanted births Fertility intentions
JEL Classification: J13 J22 J24



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

Mechanisms of a near-orthogonal ultra-fast evolution of human behaviour as a source of culture development. Christian P. Müller. Behavioural Brain Research, February 2 2020, 112521. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bbr.2020.112521

Highlights
• A new mechanism for the recent time evolution of human behaviour is proposed
• Non-genetic inheritance (NGI) and accumulation of behaviour is crucial for culture
• The human behaviourome concept is introduced
• Mechanisms of a near-orthogonal and ultra-fast NGI of the behaviourome are suggested
• Behaviourome mutations can be target-directed
• Ex-vivo storage and -accumulation of the behaviourome are pivotal for culture

Abstract: Current human culture is characterized by an increasing rate of accumulating potential and actually performed behaviours. The growth of behavioural complexity as well as the ex-vivo accumulation of human behaviour, here identified as the non-genetically inherited (NGI) behaviourome, cannot be explained by genetic/epigenetic mechanisms of inheritance. As human beings derive their socio-cultural identity predominantly from their behaviourome, mechanisms of heritability should predominantly consider inheritance and accumulation of the NGI behaviourome. Here we propose key mechanisms of a near-orthogonal and ultra-fast evolution of the NGI human behaviourome that provide a foundation not only of unique human culture development, but also of its recent acceleration. Thereby, the evolution of the human NGI behaviourome underlies similar features as genetically based evolution. However, specific mechanisms of mutation and selection work largely independent (orthogonal) from genetic/epigenetic mechanisms. We suggest a mechanism of how adaptive changes (mutations) in the NGI behaviourome work target-directed and how selection works on an ultra-fast time scale. Selection results are mostly not fatal for the individual which allows for a much increased mutation rate. For crucial accumulation of the NGI behaviourome, ex-vivo storage and retrieval systems of virtually unlimited capacity are described. We discuss the great potential of the human NGI behaviourome in respect of speculative human super-reproduction and homosexual reproduction success, as well as a possible unique human way to avoid reproduction failure in childlessness. Altogether, this model of human behavioural reproduction and accumulation of behaviour may provide a base for better understanding and prediction of uniquely human cultural development.

Keywords: behaviouromebehavioural accumulationcultural evolutionex-vivo storagenear-orthogonal evolutionnon-genetic inheritancereplication failure, super-reproductiontargeted mutationultra-fast selection

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9. Childless and homosexual reproduction success

It is speculated that a considerable part of the human population which appears threatened by reproduction failure are childless and homosexual man and women, which were denied a direct genetic reproduction. In non-human animals, the lack of genetically-related offspring and homosexuality leads to a general reproduction failure which may, however, be partly overcome by supporting kin and their offspring [182]. In humans, the individual NGI behaviourome constitutes a large part of the personal identity. This can be passed on in a gradual way, from almost complete to small traces of the individual NGI behaviourome. The individual NGI behaviourome may very well be inherited in small or even large proportions by NGI mechanisms, may it be to foster children or even children not being in any legal care responsibility. By that way, also childless and/or homosexual human individuals may reproduce their individual behavioural phenotype to a considerable extent. The degree of this reproduction may even be so large that genetically unrelated foster children are seen as a fully accepted biological offspring [242]. For example, many cuckoo children are not recognized by their fathers as not-genetically related, especially when the inherited paternal NGI behaviourome is copied to a significant degree [17].
Behavioural teaching in humans is often outsourced from the pedigree, e.g. in the kinder garden, in schools, or universities. There, teachers not only teach the macro social environment shared part of the NGI behaviourome (e.g. common knowledge and social behaviour), but also to some extent their own individual NGI behaviourome. As such, pupils may inherit always some parts of their teacher’s individual NGI behaviourome. And depending on the teacher, this can be quite large and influential for the non-kin recipients. Based on the above described proximal mechanisms of NGI, this may be one reason why teachers often prefer and treat in a more affectionate and supportive way those pupils that show a strong similarity in their individual behaviourome to the own one. When a non-kin relationship between teacher and pupil is likely or known, similarity in the NGI behavioural phenotype is preferred to similarity in the physical phenotype which would otherwise serve as a proxy indicator of genetic overlap. This may go as far as considering non-kin pupils like a “son in mind” (and behaviour), although being well aware that they are non-kin.
Even super-reproduction of the NGI behaviourome appears possible for childless and/or homosexual individuals by whom the behaviourome is transmitted to a very large population of recipients. This may or may not include homosexuality and related behaviours. Famous artists may serve here as outstanding examples for behavioural reproduction, such as e.g. Leonardo da Vinci or Oscar Wilde. Their live records (as behavioural instructions) and achievements as artists (as successful results of their NGI behaviourome) are still serving as blue prints for young artist’s attitudes and working modes. They are often seen as brilliant examples of their profession.
An as yet unanswered question in human evolution has been why do homosexuals not die out when their genome is not inherited [182]? A potential new answer to this question may be provided by NGI of the behaviourome. Homosexual partner preference and associated behavioural patterns may readily be assumed to be part of the NGI behaviourome, which is not inherited from genetic parents. At least, no genetic source for this behaviour has been discovered; neither as a preserved genetic base, nor in the shape of de novo genetic mutations [207]. Nevertheless, homosexual behaviour can be copied from non-kin and from ex-vivo sources (e.g. written records), or may be established as a de novo behaviour. Likewise, it may be passed on effectively to next generation non-kin, and become ex-vivo stored. But how is it providing any fitness benefit for those who copy and express it? The advantage may be in saving on resources that heterosexual individuals have to spend on genetic reproduction. This may set capacity free to innovate new NGI behaviours and to develop more sophisticated NGI behaviouromes that can contribute more than average to the general population NGI behaviourome pool and, thus, to culture. And as long as cultural advancement, i.e. the qualitative or quantitative expansion of the NGI behaviourome, is rewarded in a human society and enhances chances of survival for the individual, this behavioural trait may remain in the NGI behavioural pool. Nonetheless, it should be noted that certain societies do actively punish the behavioural trait of homosexuality and its in-vivo and ex-vivo inheritance and replication. Gay people are threatened by death penalty and books/movies about this behavioural phenotype are prohibited and prosecuted. The relative persistence of this behaviour may arise from the delayed nature of the cultural benefit. While the perceived threat of genetic replication failure is immediately perceived by a group, the potential benefits in cultural advancement are delayed. As such, the behavioural trait of homosexuality is submitted to a reward discounting in a group/society, which can yield opposite outcomes depending on how immediate vs. delayed reward are valued. If the immediate risk of replication failure is valued higher, the behavioural trait may become supressed, i.e. actively punished by society. If the delayed reward is valued higher, homosexuality may become accepted and even actively rewarded.
[...]

11. Empirical testing of the proposed mechanisms of a near-orthogonal ultra-fast evolution of human behaviour in culture development

Here, we described a mechanism of human NGI behaviourome evolution that was characterized as near-orthogonal and ultra-fast acting compared to genetic/epigenetic based evolution and claimed it to be a major source of present day human culture. As this is currently only a speculative account, all components of this claim would need empirical testing and the opportunity of falsification. This may be done by addressing each feature separately.
The “near-orthogonal” claim can be falsified when evidence shows that the human NGI behaviourome has a predominant genetic/epigenetic base that essentially displays the same temporal dynamic change as the human behavioural phenotype. For that, it would be an important research goal to empirically classify the full human NGI behaviourome in all its current complexity and to empirically monitor its changes closely from now on. From the starting point of a categorized present day human NGI behaviourome, one should estimate backwards its dynamic change over the last five thousand years. This may be paralleled by measurements of the human genome/epigenome development backward and forward. Behavioural and genetic/epigenetic data may then allow testing of whether and to what extent the dynamic development of the human behaviourome over that time is best described by a process near-orthogonal and, thus, largely independent from genetic/epigenetic evolution. Likewise the “ultra-fast” nature can be tested by comparing time scales and the degree of behaviourome change. Time scales for alterations of the human genome/epigenome that are known to have changed human behaviour and the dynamic of behavioural changes for which no genetic base can be identified, may be compared in the relevant 5000 years.
A proposed unique characteristic of the evolution of the human NGI behaviourome is its capability for targeted mutations of behaviour, e.g. during puberty. Thereby, the proposed Lamarckian mechanism may be experimentally tested in longitudinal studies where single parental behaviours may be artificially introduced that would be mildly maladaptive for the offspring, and trans-generational mutation rate is measured together with rate and quality of newly invented behaviours that can replace the abandoned/non-replicated ones. However, when ethical concerns should limit this experimental approach, also quasi-experimental post hoc analysis of behavioural mutations during puberty would provide some clues.
If the claim that the presented mechanism is a major driving force for human culture, it would be critical to test for an accumulation of the NGI behaviourome, i.e. the sheer number of human behaviours should increase in the relevant time span, which should not be paralleled by an increase in behaviourally relevant genes or epigenetic modifications.

12. Summary and outlook

If a biological, psychological or cultural theory of evolution wishes to explain development and current diversity of life, it also has to capture the present appearance of human beings. It has to provide a reasonable account of its radical transformation in the last few thousand years. Here we tried to identify and characterize mechanisms of a near-orthogonal and ultra-fast evolution of human behaviour which serve as an essential prerequisite for human cultural development in the last 5.000 years of human history. In that they are not meant to replace a genetic/epigenetic based evolution, but to largely expand them by mechanisms which allow to better explain many features of human culture that cannot be readily captured by genetic evolution. The Darwinian account of evolution comprises all living beings on earth, may they express behaviour or not. Human behavioural evolution theory, in contrast, captures only a relatively small aspect of biology, the NGI component of the human behaviourome. Nevertheless, this is the one that has submitted the surface of earth to probably the most profound changes induced by living species ever recorded in the history of life on earth, with significant effects on virtually all other species and on inanimate nature. Among those changes is what we consider as human culture, a vast array of NGI behaviours that are no longer genetically coded, but inherited, externally stored, spread and accumulated. In that the present account attempts to provide an explanatory scheme of how distinct genetically inherited features gave rise to human culture.

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

Wokeademia. John Cochrane. Thursday, January 30, 2020. https://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2020/01/wokeademia.html

I'm working on an economic view of political polarization. One aspect of that project is the extent to which many institutions in our society have become politicized. Today's post is one little data point in that larger story. It tells a little story of how to politicize an institution and silence dissenters.

Jerry Coyne reports on the "diversity equity and inclusion statement" required of anyone hired by the University of California, or desiring a raise or promotion. This is a required statement each candidate must write "Demonstrating Interest in and Ability to Advance Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion." It's not about whether you are "diverse," meaning belonging to a racial, gender, or sexual-preference group the University wishes to hire. It is a statement, as it says, of your active participation in a  political movement.

Jerry's news in this post is that the statements are now being scored numerically, and only the files of those scoring high enough are passed on for scholarly review. 

[...]

The university not only requires the statements, but gives
these statements precedence in the hiring process, so that if your statement doesn’t exceed a minimum numerical cutoff for promoting diversity, increasing it in your past, and promulgating it in the future should you be hired, your candidacy is terminated

[...]

Jerry links to the UC Rubric to assess candidate contributions to diversity equity and inclusion. It's lovely that they are so secure they don't think they have to hide this sort of thing.

 [Impressive, read it all: https://ofew.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/rubric_to_assess_candidate_contributions_to_diversity_equity_and_inclusion.pdf]


Much more details, links at the original post.

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

The Othello Effect: People are more disturbed by others' wrong beliefs than by different beliefs. Andras Molnar, George Loewenstein. Carnegie Mellon University, PA, January 2020. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/338828490

Abstract: We propose an alternative account to the theory of belief homophily--that people have an intrinsic distaste for encountering differences in beliefs. We argue that when people face others who hold beliefs different from their own, they do not find these encounters disturbing because others hold different beliefs per se, but because they are convinced that others hold false beliefs. In three preregistered studies (N = 1408) featuring self-recalled personal experiences and vignette scenarios, we demonstrate that participants are more disturbed when others hold false beliefs, compared to cases in which others' beliefs are different, even when participants' objective knowledge about the validity of beliefs is held constant. This effect is robust across contexts and types of social interactions, and is present among all ages and both sexes. We also show that higher confidence that others hold wrong beliefs, but not different beliefs, evokes stronger negative emotions.


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

Conformity and Individuals’ Response to Information About Aggregate Turnout. André Blais, Rafael Hortala-Vallve. Political Behavior, February 1 2020. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11109-020-09595-5

Abstract: 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. We argue that in addition to the classic calculus of voting, conformist voters have an added incentive to ‘follow the pack’ and vote when turnout is high while abstain when turnout is low. We conduct two separate experiments, the first a survey experiment with a representative sample of the UK population and the second a lab experiment in Canada. Both studies confirm our hypothesis. These findings highlight the importance of taking individuals’ level of conformity into account when explaining their decision to vote or abstain.

Keywords: Conformity Turnout Survey experiment Lab experiment

Conclusion

Our research highlights the importance of including social conformity in the study of political phenomena. Recent research in political psychology has focused on the Big Five personality traits (see especially Mondak et al. ) but our study suggests that we should go beyond these personality traits. Politics is very much about collective decision-making, so there is an underlying tension between the desire for personal autonomy and the need for social norms that are respected and followed by everyone in the community. Citizens strike a different balance between these two considerations, and this is bound to shape their behavior.
We have combined a survey experiment conducted in Britain and a lab experiment performed in Canada to test our hypothesis. Both studies produced remarkably similar findings: in both instances, people who score higher on the social conformity scale are more prone to vote (abstain) when they know that most other people vote (abstain) while those who score low on the conformity scale have exactly the opposite reaction. If a predicted high turnout makes conformists more inclined to vote and if there are many conformists in the electorate, then a relatively high turnout would be an equilibrium.
The implications of our study hinge in good part of the distribution of individuals across the conformity scale in a given society at a given point in time. To the best of our knowledge there are no time-series or cross-section data about the distribution of conformity across societies or over time. The data that we have collected in Britain (see Fig. A1 in Online Appendix A1) suggest a relatively normal distribution, with the mean (7.52 on a 0 to 17 scale) indicating a slight majority of non-conformists. The point remains that, at least in our representative poll of British society, there are many people with conformist leanings.
We therefore end with a call for more attention to be paid to an individual’s social conformity. A huge literature exists in social psychology about the role of conformity, yet little research has been devoted to its impact in political life. Our study suggests that it is a crucial variable in the decision to vote or abstain. There are good reasons to believe that it shapes other political phenomena such as the decision to participate in demonstrations or to engage in strategic or bandwagon voting. It makes sense to assume that many people pay attention to information about what others in the community are likely to do when deciding whether to vote or abstain. Political scientists need to integrate such considerations into their models and analyses.
Our study also raises important questions about the relationship between social conformity and other factors that may affect voter turnout. One such question pertains to the relationship between social conformity and sense of civic duty. Are conformists more prone to believe that they have a moral obligation to vote? Are both attitudes shaped by personality traits? Another set of questions is about the relationship between social conformity and social pressure. We would expect conformists to pay attention to social pressure. But what kind of social pressure? In this study, we have examined how conformists react to information about aggregate turnout. But what happens when conformists are exposed to conflicting information, if/when for instance they learn that turnout in the country is going to be high but that most friends/relatives are going to abstain? These are big questions about which we have no clear answer.