Saturday, January 2, 2021

Sweden: Women in this work were more likely than men to avoid eating gluten, red meat, white flour and food additives due to perceived unhealthiness, and reported more diet and health related anxiety

Gender differences in perceived food healthiness and food avoidance in a Swedish population-based survey: a cross sectional study. Linnea Bärebring, Maria Palmqvist, Anna Winkvist & Hanna Augustin. Nutrition Journal volume 19, Article number: 140, Dec 29 2020. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12937-020-00659-0

Rolf Degen's take: https://twitter.com/DegenRolf/status/1345253441212477440

Abstract

Background: The aim of this work was to study potential gender differences in perceived food healthiness and food avoidance in a population-representative sample of the Swedish adult population.

Methods: A questionnaire regarding diet and health was posted to 2000 randomly selected residents in Sweden, aged 20–65 years. Questions were posed regarding which foods or food components the participants avoided due to perceived unhealthiness and how healthy they believed the food items to be. The pre-specified food components included sugar, carbohydrate, gluten, lactose, dairy, fat, saturated fat, red meat, white flour, salt, alcohol and food additives (specifically glutamate, sweetening, preservative and coloring agents). Chi square tests were used to study differences in perceived food healthiness and food avoidance depending on gender.

Results: Around 50% reported avoidance of sugar (51.6%) and sweeting agents (45.2%), whereas fewer reported avoidance of saturated fat (16.8%) and salt (10.6%). Women were more likely than men to avoid gluten (AOR [95% CI] 2.84 [1.33–6.05]), red meat (3.29 [1.86–5.80]), white flour (2.64 [1.65–4.21]), preservatives (1.7 [1.07–2.70]) and coloring agents (2.10 [1.29–3.41]) due to perceived unhealthiness. Gender differences were also apparent in perceived healthiness of sugar, gluten, dairy, red meat, white flour, alcohol and food additives, where women tended to be more negative than men in their attitudes. Women more often said to read new findings in media about diet (16% vs 9%, p = 0.029) and prioritize a healthy lifestyle (35% vs 25%, p = 0.015). More than a third of both women and men reported worrying over the healthiness of their diet, and a higher proportion of women than men (18% vs 11%, p = 0.015) agreed with the statement that they were often anxious over having an unhealthy diet.

Conclusions: Women in this population-based study of residents in Sweden were more likely than men to avoid eating gluten, red meat, white flour and food additives due to perceived unhealthiness, and reported more diet and health related anxiety. Future research to identify effective ways of promoting healthy eating for both women and men, while minimizing diet-health related anxiety, is highly warranted.


Discussion

The results of this study show that there are gender differences in both perceived food healthiness and in food avoidance in Sweden. Overall, women reported more negative perceptions on the healthiness of sugar, gluten, dairy, red meat, white flour, alcohol and food additives. In addition, women were more likely to avoid gluten, red meat, white flour and food additives. Women also reported more anxiety related to food and health.

We found that there are gender differences in perceived healthiness of food that impacts dietary behavior. Previous studies show that women focus on nutritional value of food [10] and prioritize healthy eating [7] more so than do men. We found that the foods or food components most commonly viewed as “very unhealthy” and most commonly avoided were sugar, food additives, alcohol, saturated fat and white flour. This is in line with previous findings that women perceive sweet foods as less healthy [11] and avoid consumption of high fat foods to a higher extent [7], compared to men. A Swedish national survey from 2016 showed that women perceive the risk of falling ill through harmful substances such as chemicals in their diet, as higher than men [12]. This might, at least in part, explain why women had more negative views on food additives such as sweetening, coloring and conserving agents. Though all approved food additives are considered safe for human consumption, our findings suggest that there is a widespread concern of the health effects of these substances.

It is noteworthy that both women and men (but women more so than men) had more negative views on food additives than of established dietary risk factors such as salt, saturated fat and alcohol. This is possibly due to the recent year’s trend toward eating “clean” [13], which refers to consumption of unprocessed, whole foods and sometimes the elimination of entire food groups (e.g. dairy, sugar or gluten) [14]. Though perceived as healthy by many [14], “clean eating” does not guarantee a high quality diet [15] and could be associated with disordered eating [16]. As women’s dietary behavior to a greater extent than men’s seems impacted by perceived healthiness and is more likely to change over time [17] –dietary fads might have a greater impact on women’s diet. Previous findings from the current research project showed that women were indeed more likely than men to keep a specific diet and attempt to lose weight [9]. This could also be a reflection of women’s greater tendency to be impacted by dietary fads and trends. The specific diet, or foods or food components that are avoided likely differs over time, but this needs verification in longitudinal studies.

The observed gender differences in the current and previous studies might have significant implications for public health. Findings are consistent that women are more health conscious than men –both in general [8] and in specific regards to their diet [7]. This might have parallel effects, where women eat healthier than men but also have more body shape concerns and diet-related anxiety. Perceived diet-related risks are assessed by both emotional and cognitive considerations, among both women and men [18]. Thereby, simply providing more information on diet and health is unlikely to eliminate gender differences in food perception and avoidance. More research is needed to identify effective ways of promoting healthy eating for both women and men, while minimizing diet-health related anxiety.

Strengths and limitation

Strengths of the current study include the relatively high response rate (28%) for this kind of study, and that the study sample is deemed population-representative. We have previously concluded that the sample seems representative of the general Swedish population in regards to prevalence of overweight and income, whereas the education level was slightly higher than the general Swedish population [9]. The proportions of women and men in the study are 55 and 45%, which indicated that women are slightly overrepresented (as the national gender distribution is 50% women, 50% men). Thus, there are small differences in sociodemographic data in this study sample, compared to the general population. The study results are thereby likely generalizable to the Swedish population in the current age span. Limitations include a lack of detailed dietary intake data to verify that reported food avoidance was also reflected in actual diet. In addition, a number of statistical tests were performed on several variables in this paper, and p-values should thereby be interpreted with caution. An additional limitation is the pre-specified answers that may have restricted the range of possible responses to the questions. Even though free text options were available, these were not frequently used. Future studies should consider combining quantitative and qualitative approaches to provide further clarity to the motivations for women’s more frequent food avoidance.

Female bias crime suspects are more likely than men to target friends & family members, to target other women, & more frequently commit crimes based on race/ethnicity/national origin than on religion or sexual orientation

Stotzer, R., Godinet, M.T. and Davidson, J.T., 2020. Unique Characteristics of Bias Crimes Committed by Males or Females in the United States. Journal of Hate Studies, 16(1), pp.35–47. http://doi.org/10.33972/jhs.153

Rolf Degen's bias: https://twitter.com/DegenRolf/status/1345240406884298753

Abstract: Despite increased research on women’s criminal offending patterns, research on women’s involvement in bias crimes is almost nonexistent. This study examines bias crime incidences that are considered crimes against persons (e.g., assault, murder, robbery, sexual assault) collected in the National Incidence-based Reporting System from 2009–2012 to determine what features characterize crimes committed by men or women. Results indicate that female bias crime suspects choose different victims than male suspects; female suspects are more likely than men to target friends and family members, more likely to target other women, and more frequently commit crimes based on race/ethnicity/national origin than religion or sexual orientation-based bias crimes, and were less likely to use a firearm. Men and women were similar in their suspect characteristics (such as using alcohol/drugs before the crime) and the overall incident characteristics (such as causing injury). These results suggest that we need to more critically examine current models of bias crime commission, and to include bias crimes as another avenue to help uncover differences in male and female offending.

Keywords: Bias crimes, Hate Crimes, Females, Perpetrators, Victims, Gender differences

Conclusions and Discussion

The results of this study of NIBRS data from 2009-2012 show that crimes against persons involving males and females who are suspects in bias crimes share many similar characteristics, but there are also important differences that deserve attention. Females demonstrated the greatest differences in their victim selection, being more likely than males to victimize their friends and family members, to victimize other women or a group of victims that include women, and were more likely to be motivated by a victim’s race/ethnicity/national origin than other bias types. However, incidents involving male and female offenders had similar suspect characteristics and incident characteristics outside of the use of weapons, suggesting the greatest difference between male and female bias crime offenders is how they select their victims.

While males and females demonstrated differences at the bivariate level in regard to the use of alcohol or other drugs before the commission of the crime and being in groups of suspects rather than acting alone, these differences did not retain statistical significance in the logistic regression. In regard to characteristics of the crime itself, bivariate statistics suggested women were more likely than men to commit their crimes in residences rather than public spaces. However, this difference in location was not significant in the logistic regression. While injury severity was statistically significant at the bivariate level, neither was significant in the logistic regression, but weapons use was significant with women being less likely than men to use a firearm.

Many of these differences reflect the differences between men and women who commit non-bias crimes. For example, men are more likely to use firearms in non-bias crimes than women, which held true among these bias crimes as well. Similar to the pattern of offending among non-bias crimes, women were more likely to victimize people they knew, particularly intimates, while men targeted strangers in a higher percentage. Also similar to non-bias crimes, female bias crime suspects victimized other women in higher percentages while men predominantly victimized other men.

New information uncovered in this analysis was the fact that women were overrepresented among bias crimes based on a victim’s race/ethnicity and underrepresented among bias crimes based on sexual orientation or religion. In these ways men and women may differ in their bias crime violence in ways that are similar to the ways that men and women differ in perpetrating non-bias crimes. And, too, women may also be exhibiting patterns that align with theories around multiple marginality, that gender, race, and class all intersect to shape the social space within which women commit crime (Chesney-Lind, 2006). These data cannot be used to explain why female bias crime offenders were more likely to commit crimes in residences, against individuals they knew, and without weapons. However, the general pattern of female offender restrictions within patriarchal structures would suggest that limited opportunities restrict their ability to commit bias crimes as well. In other words, gender roles and socialization may very well restrict the opportunities to commit both bias and non-bias crimes, so crimes are closer to home and without the benefit of weapons. A pathways perspective would also suggest that female bias crime offenders are more relational in their crime choices (Belknap & Holsinger, 2006).

A pathways perspective is useful in the interpretation of the important differences that emerged when comparing these results among bias crimes to the pattern of male and female offending in non-bias crimes. Female suspects were more likely to target victims in residences among non-bias crimes, and while that relationship held true among bias crimes at the bivariate level, this relationship did not emerge as significant in the regression analysis. Male suspects have also been found to cause more serious injury than female suspects in non-bias crimes, and again, this was found among non-bias crimes at the bivariate level, but not in the regression analysis. In these ways, male and female suspects may be more similar, and gender less of a predictive factor, when committing bias crime than when committing non-bias crimes.

While much more needs to be discovered in the area of gender and the commission of bias crimes, these findings are nonetheless interesting in light of the pathways approach to understand female offending, arguably the most prevalent model of analyzing and thinking about female crimes today. The pathways model, in the main, explains how histories of victimization often precede female offending, and how crimes are often linked to survival, physical or emotional (Belknap & Holsinger, 2006). In this light, non-bias crime offending for women can be thought of as a reaction to circumstances. Bias crimes are different, though. There is not always a tangible gain from the commission of a bias crime. These crimes are about motivation, and it is unclear whether, if at all, the traditional pathways approach can apply to bias crime offending. The nature of bias crimes makes it unlikely that crimes of this type are related to survival. Also unclear is whether female bias crime offenders might fit into one of the multiple pathways to crime as presented by Brennan, Breitenbach, Dieterich, Salisbury, and von Voorhis (2012) as they relate to the feminist pathways approach. Or, as Pezzella (2017) questions, perhaps additional categories need to be added to the McDevitt, Levin, and Bennet (2002) typology of bias offenders. The research in this area is too sparse, and new, to make that determination at this time.

While these results do not conclusively create a model for female’s participation in bias crimes, nor were they intended to, they nonetheless offer an important lens on the examination of bias crime, and offers avenues for future research to build theories for the gendered nature of bias crime involvement. Current theories around the gendered nature of bias crime has centered around men, both as victims and as offenders, these results highlight that bias crimes are not inherently the domain of men. Prior research into sexual orientation-based bias crimes has found that bias crimes are deeply intersectional (Meyer, 20082010Stotzer, 2010), and that race, class, and gender are often intertwined. Rather than looking at gender alone, this finding demonstrates a need to look more closely at how gender interacts with other factors in order to better explain why women target women and men target men during bias crime incidents.

While this study offers a preliminary glimpse into the differences between men and women’s pattern of bias crime offending, there are significant limitations to the study. First, a significant proportion of bias crimes are not reported to officials (Harlow, 2005), suggesting an initial bias in any official reports, including NIBRS, that may not capture the entire spectrum of bias crime. Second, while NIBRS is a significant improvement in data collection across the United States, it is not representative. Because of the laborious nature of processing incident-level reporting to the federal government, densely populated cities and states have not traditionally provided data to NIBRS. Thus, these findings might be generalizable to less dense jurisdictions rather than bias crimes that have been committed in dense urban locations. Third, the categorical nature of the data collection in NIBRS means that significant nuance in motives and crime characteristics have been lost. While some inferences can be drawn from the patterns in bias crime characteristics, additional research that can directly provide explanatory information are sorely needed. Fourth, as is typical with most large-scale, voluntary data collection efforts, missing data are a significant concern for generalizability. In particular, the variables related to weapons use and injury severity had the largest percentage of missing data compared to other variables in the analysis and limited the sample size. Fifth, the study was limited to crimes against persons since those crimes are more frequently able to identify a suspect compared to property crimes, such as vandalism, which are often discovered after the act has been completed. Given the large portion of bias crimes that are against property, particularly anti-Semitic bias crimes, this study cannot be generalized to bias crimes overall, only to those that are considered crimes against person. Last, while this study examined the unique characteristics of males and females, incidents that involved mixed gender groups of suspects were excluded. Future studies should examine to what degree these mixed gender groups share, or diverge from, the characteristics of men’s and women’s offending.

Taken together, these analyses suggest that current characterizations of bias crimes as occurring in public between strangers may have some viability for characterizing men’s participation in bias crimes, but does not adequately match the pattern of women’s offending. Similar to studies of non-bias crimes and the pattern of male and female offending, this study can directly identify how male and female offenders are similar or different, but can only indirectly offer possible explanations for why these differences exist. This research fills a current gap by informing what the nature of gendered bias crimes looks like. But, further research into female bias crime offenders can inform the current bias crime literature by expanding the understanding of offenders and their (gendered) motives. The sex differences in victim selection, rather than incident or offender characteristics, can also prove a fruitful area of additional research to further explore the differences between male and female offenders overall. However, there were also many similarities between men and women in the characteristics of their crime, and future research should begin isolating what factors may be driving these differences and what rewards and reinforces men’s and women’s bias crime offending.

Future research should employ a decidedly feminist approach, ensuring that female bias crime offenders are an intentional component of research, and that their voices are heard. Qualitative data of this nature are needed in order to inform the patterns demonstrated from this study. These types of data, merged with the quantitative data presented in this study, can create a foundation around which theory can begin to be built as well as an understanding of how, if at all, females ‘do gender’ in the commission of bias crimes.

Forecasts didn't cost Hillary Clinton votes among overconfident Democrats, but lowered turnout among Republicans confident their candidate would lose & stimulated turnout among Democrats confident their candidate would win

Revisiting the Link between Expected Election Outcomes and Turnout. Elizabeth C. Connors, Jacob A. Martin, John Barry Ryan. http://www.elizabethchaseconnors.com/images/Election%20Outcomes.pdf

Abstract: Westwood et al. (2020) causally demonstrate that probabilistic forecasts reduce beliefs about electoral competition, which, in turn, results in a lower propensity to vote. They argue this may have cost Hillary Clinton votes among overconfident supporters. Using the American National Election Study (ANES) from 2004 to 2016, we find that believing an election will not be close can affect turnout. The strongest evidence, however, suggests only those who believe their party’s candidate will lose by quite a bit are less likely to vote. Analysis of validated vote in 2016 does not support the conclusion that probabilistic forecasts cost Hillary Clinton votes among overconfident Democrats. The results suggest, if the probabilistic forecasts had any effect, they either lowered turnout among Republicans confident their candidate will lose or stimulated turnout among Democrats confident their candidate will win.


Friday, January 1, 2021

Police stations are more likely to be located within walking distance of foreign religious sites (churches) than temples, even after controlling for the estimated population within 1km of each site & a set of key site attributes

Standing By: The Spatial Organization of Coercive Institutions in China. Adam Y. Liu, Charles Chang. Social Science Research, January 1 2021, 102517. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssresearch.2020.102517

Abstract: How do authoritarian states organize their coercive institutions over space? We argue that autocrats maximize the utility of their limited coercive resources by clustering them with perceived threats in society, i.e., segments of the population that are ideologically distant and have mobilizational potential. We test this proposition using a dataset that covers the universe of police stations (N=147,428) and religious sites (N=115,394) in China. We find that police stations are more likely to be located within walking distance of foreign religious sites (churches) than other sites (temples), even after controlling for the estimated population within 1km of each site and a set of key site attributes. This finding is robust to using alternative model specifications, different variable measurements, and multiple data sources. Moving beyond the clustering pattern, we also address the temporal order issue and show that the Chinese state has allocated more new coercive resources around existing foreign religious sites than native sites, i.e., after these sites are already in place. This study enriches our understanding of how autocrats rule and further opens up an emerging new methodological avenue for research on authoritarian politics.

Key words: autocracyspatialcoercionreligionpolicingChina


92pct were willing to sacrifice at least some money to help their inparty & hurt the ouparty; strong partisans & extreme ideologues sacrificed more resources for the inparty, wherereas the opposite occured for the outparty

Altruism and Spite in Politics: How the Mind Makes Welfare Tradeoffs About Political Parties. Alessandro Del Ponte, Andrew W. Delton & Peter DeScioli. Political Behavior, Jan 1 2021. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11109-020-09660-z

Abstract: How much will people sacrifice to support or oppose political parties? Extending previous work on the psychology of interpersonal cooperation, we propose that people’s minds compute a distinct cost–benefit ratio—a welfare tradeoff ratio—that regulates their choices to help or hurt political parties. In two experiments, participants decide whether to financially help and hurt the inparty and outparty. The results show that participants were extremely consistent (> 90%) while making dozens of decisions in a randomized order, providing evidence for tradeoff ratios toward parties. Moreover, participants’ ratios correlated in the expected directions with partisanship, political ideology, and feelings of enthusiasm and anger toward each party, corroborating that these ratios are politically meaningful. Generally, most participants were willing to sacrifice at least some money to help their inparty and hurt the outparty. At the same time, a sizable minority hurt their inparty and helped their outparty. Welfare tradeoff ratios push our understanding of partisanship beyond the classic debate about whether voters are rational or irrational. Underneath the turbulent surface of partisan passions hide precise calculations that proportion our altruism and spite toward parties.


The End of the Wilsonian Era: Why Liberal Internationalism Failed

The End of the Wilsonian Era: Why Liberal Internationalism Failed. Walter Russell Mead. Foreign Affairs, January/February 2021. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2020-12-08/end-wilsonian-era

One hundred years after the U.S. Senate humiliated President Woodrow Wilson by rejecting the Treaty of Versailles, Princeton University, which Wilson led as its president before launching his political career, struck his name from its famous school of international affairs. As “cancellations” go, this one is at least arguably deserved. Wilson was an egregious racist even by the standards of his time, and the man behind the persecution of his own political opponents and the abuses of the first Red Scare has been celebrated for far too long and far too uncritically. 

But however problematic Wilson’s personal views and domestic policies were, as a statesman and ideologist, he must be counted among the most influential makers of the modern world. He was not a particularly original thinker. More than a century before Wilson proposed the League of Nations, Tsar Alexander I of Russia had alarmed his fellow rulers at the Congress of Vienna by articulating a similar vision: an international system that would rest on a moral consensus upheld by a concert of powers that would operate from a shared set of ideas about legitimate sovereignty. By Wilson’s time, moreover, the belief that democratic institutions contributed to international peace whereas absolute monarchies were inherently warlike and unstable was almost a commonplace observation among educated Americans and Britons. Wilson’s contribution was to synthesize those ideas into a concrete program for a rules-based order grounded in a set of international institutions. 

[...]

THE ORDER OF THINGS

Wilsonianism is only one version of a rules-based world order among many. The Westphalian system, which emerged in Europe after the Thirty Years’ War ended in 1648, and the Congress system, which arose in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars of the early nineteenth century, were both rules-based and even law-based; some of the foundational ideas of international law date from those eras. And the Holy Roman Empire—a transnational collection of territories that stretched from France into modern-day Poland and from Hamburg to Milan—was an international system that foreshadowed the European Union, with highly complex rules governing everything from trade to sovereign inheritance among princely houses. 

As for human rights, by the early twentieth century, the pre-Wilsonian European system had been moving for a century in the direction of putting egregious violations of human rights onto the international agenda. Then, as now, it was chiefly weak countries whose oppressive behavior attracted the most attention. The genocidal murder of Ottoman Christian minorities at the hands of Ottoman troops and irregular forces in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries received substantially more attention than atrocities carried out around the same time by Russian forces against rebellious Muslim peoples in the Caucasus. No delegation of European powers came to Washington to discuss the treatment of Native Americans or to make representations concerning the status of African Americans. Nevertheless, the pre-Wilsonian European order had moved significantly in the direction of elevating human rights to the level of diplomacy. 

Wilson, therefore, was not introducing the ideas of world order and human rights to a collection of previously anarchic states and unenlightened polities. Rather, his quest was to reform an existing international order whose defects had been conclusively demonstrated by the horrors of World War I. In the pre-Wilsonian order, established dynastic rulers were generally regarded as legitimate, and interventions such as the 1849 Russian invasion of Hungary, which restored Habsburg rule, were considered lawful. Except in the most glaring instances, states were more or less free to treat their citizens or subjects as they wished, and although governments were expected to observe the accepted principles of public international law, no supranational body was charged with the enforcement of these standards. The preservation of the balance of power was invoked as a goal to guide states; war, although regrettable, was seen as a legitimate element of the system. From Wilson’s standpoint, these were fatal flaws that made future conflagrations inevitable. To redress them, he sought to build an order in which states would accept enforceable legal restrictions on their behavior at home and their international conduct. 

That never quite materialized, but until recent years, the U.S.-led postwar order resembled Wilson’s vision in important respects. And, it should be noted, that vision is not equally dead everywhere. Although Wilson was an American, his view of world order was first and foremost developed as a method for managing international politics in Europe, and it is in Europe where Wilson’s ideas have had their greatest success and where their prospects continue to look strongest. His ideas were treated with bitter and cynical contempt by most European statesmen when he first proposed them, but they later became the fundamental basis of the European order, enshrined in the laws and practices of the EU. Arguably, no ruler since Charlemagne has made as deep an impression on the European political order as the much-mocked Presbyterian from the Shenandoah Valley. 


THE ARC OF HISTORY

Beyond Europe, the prospects for the Wilsonian order are bleak. The reasons behind its demise, however, are different from what many assume. Critics of the Wilsonian approach to foreign affairs often decry what they see as its idealism. In fact, as Wilson demonstrated during the negotiations over the Treaty of Versailles, he was perfectly capable of the most cynical realpolitik when it suited him. The real problem of Wilsonianism is not a naive faith in good intentions but a simplistic view of the historical process, especially when it comes to the impact of technological progress on human social order. Wilson’s problem was not that he was a prig but that he was a Whig. 

Like early-twentieth-century progressives generally and many American intellectuals to this day, Wilson was a liberal determinist of the Anglo-Saxon school; he shared the optimism of what the scholar Herbert Butterfield called “the Whig historians,” the Victorian-era British thinkers who saw human history as a narrative of inexorable progress and betterment. Wilson believed that the so-called ordered liberty that characterized the Anglo-American countries had opened a path to permanent prosperity and peace. This belief represents a sort of Anglo-Saxon Hegelianism and holds that the mix of free markets, free government, and the rule of law that developed in the United Kingdom and the United States is inevitably transforming the rest of the world—and that as this process continues, the world will slowly and for the most part voluntarily converge on the values that made the Anglo-Saxon world as wealthy, attractive, and free as it has become. 

Wilson was the devout son of a minister, deeply steeped in Calvinist teachings about predestination and the utter sovereignty of God, and he believed that the arc of progress was fated. The future would fulfill biblical prophecies of a coming millennium: a thousand-year reign of peace and prosperity before the final consummation of human existence, when a returning Christ would unite heaven and earth. (Today’s Wilsonians have given this determinism a secular twist: in their eyes, liberalism will rule the future and bring humanity to “the end of history” as a result of human nature rather than divine purpose.) 

Wilson believed that the defeat of imperial Germany in World War I and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Ottoman empires meant that the hour of a universal League of Nations had finally arrived. In 1945, American leaders ranging from Eleanor Roosevelt and Henry Wallace on the left to Wendell Willkie and Thomas Dewey on the right would interpret the fall of Germany and Japan in much the same way. In the early 1990s, leading U.S. foreign policymakers and commentators saw the fall of the Soviet Union through the same deterministic prism: as a signal that the time had come for a truly global and truly liberal world order. On all three occasions, Wilsonian order builders seemed to be in sight of their goal. But each time, like Ulysses, they were blown off course by contrary winds. 


TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES

Today, those winds are gaining strength. Anyone hoping to reinvigorate the flagging Wilsonian project must contend with a number of obstacles. The most obvious is the return of ideology-fueled geopolitics. China, Russia, and a number of smaller powers aligned with them—Iran, for example—correctly see Wilsonian ideals as a deadly threat to their domestic arrangements. Earlier in the post–Cold War period, U.S. primacy was so thorough that those countries attempted to downplay or disguise their opposition to the prevailing pro-democracy consensus. Beginning in U.S. President Barack Obama’s second term, however, and continuing through the Trump era, they have become less inhibited. Seeing Wilsonianism as a cover for American and, to some degree, EU ambitions, Beijing and Moscow have grown increasingly bold about contesting Wilsonian ideas and initiatives inside international institutions such as the UN and on the ground in places from Syria to the South China Sea.

These powers’ opposition to the Wilsonian order is corrosive in several ways. It raises the risks and costs for Wilsonian powers to intervene in conflicts beyond their own borders. Consider, for example, how Iranian and Russian support for the Assad regime in Syria has helped prevent the United States and European countries from getting more directly involved in that country’s civil war. The presence of great powers in the anti-Wilsonian coalition also provides shelter and assistance to smaller powers that otherwise might not choose to resist the status quo. Finally, the membership of countries such as China and Russia in international institutions makes it more difficult for those institutions to operate in support of Wilsonian norms: take, for example, Chinese and Russian vetoes in the UN Security Council, the election of anti-Wilsonian representatives to various UN bodies, and the opposition by countries such as Hungary and Poland to EU measures intended to promote the rule of law. 

Meanwhile, the torrent of technological innovation and change known as “the information revolution” creates obstacles for Wilsonian goals within countries and in the international system. The irony is that Wilsonians often believe that technological progress will make the world more governable and politics more rational—even if it also adds to the danger of war by making it so much more destructive. Wilson himself believed just that, as did the postwar order builders and the liberals who sought to extend the U.S.-led order after the Cold War. Each time, however, this faith in technological change was misplaced. As seen most recently with the rise of the Internet, although new technologies often contribute to the spread of liberal ideas and practices, they can also undermine democratic systems and aid authoritarian regimes.

Today, as new technologies disrupt entire industries, and as social media upends the news media and election campaigning, politics is becoming more turbulent and polarized in many countries. That makes the victory of populist and antiestablishment candidates from both the left and the right more likely in many places. It also makes it harder for national leaders to pursue the compromises that international cooperation inevitably requires and increases the chances that incoming governments will refuse to be bound by the acts of their predecessors. 

The information revolution is destabilizing international life in other ways that make it harder for rules-based international institutions to cope. Take, for example, the issue of arms control, a central concern of Wilsonian foreign policy since World War I and one that grew even more important following the development of nuclear weapons. Wilsonians prioritize arms control not just because nuclear warfare could destroy the human race but also because, even if unused, nuclear weapons or their equivalent put the Wilsonian dream of a completely rules-based, law-bound international order out of reach. Weapons of mass destruction guarantee exactly the kind of state sovereignty that Wilsonians think is incompatible with humanity’s long-term security. One cannot easily stage a humanitarian intervention against a nuclear power. 

The fight against proliferation has had its successes, and the spread of nuclear weapons has been delayed—but it has not stopped, and the fight is getting harder over time. In the 1940s, it took the world’s richest nation and a consortium of leading scientists to assemble the first nuclear weapon. Today, second- and third-rate scientific establishments in low-income countries can manage the feat. That does not mean that the fight against proliferation should be abandoned. It is merely a reminder that not all diseases have cures. 

What is more, the technological progress that underlies the information revolution significantly exacerbates the problem of arms control. The development of cyberweapons and the potential of biological agents to inflict strategic damage on adversaries—graphically demonstrated by the COVID-19 pandemic—serve as warnings that new tools of warfare will be significantly more difficult to monitor or control than nuclear technology. Effective arms control in these fields may well not be possible. The science is changing too quickly, the research behind them is too hard to detect, and too many of the key technologies cannot be banned outright because they also have beneficial civilian applications. 

In addition, economic incentives that did not exist in the Cold War are now pushing arms races in new fields. Nuclear weapons and long-range missile technology were extremely expensive and brought few benefits to the civilian economy. Biological and technological research, by contrast, are critical for any country or company that hopes to remain competitive in the twenty-first century. An uncontrollable, multipolar arms race across a range of cutting-edge technologies is on the horizon, and it will undercut hopes for a revived Wilsonian order. 

IT’S NOT FOR EVERYBODY
One of the central assumptions behind the quest for a Wilsonian order is the belief that as countries develop, they become more similar to already developed countries and will eventually converge on the liberal capitalist model that shapes North America and western Europe. The Wilsonian project requires a high degree of convergence to succeed; the member states of a Wilsonian order must be democratic, and they must be willing and able to conduct their international relations within liberal multilateral institutions. 

At least for the medium term, the belief in convergence can no longer be sustained. Today, China, India, Russia, and Turkey all seem less likely to converge on liberal democracy than they did in 1990. These countries and many others have developed economically and technologically not in order to become more like the West but rather to achieve a deeper independence from the West and to pursue civilizational and political goals of their own. 

In truth, Wilsonianism is a particularly European solution to a particularly European set of problems. Since the fall of the Roman Empire, Europe has been divided into peer and near-peer competitors. War was the constant condition of Europe for much of its history, and Europe’s global dominance in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century can be attributed in no small part to the long contest for supremacy between France and the United Kingdom, which promoted developments in finance, state organization, industrial techniques, and the art of war that made European states fierce and ferocious competitors. 

With the specter of great-power war constantly hanging over them, European states developed a more intricate system of diplomacy and international politics than did countries in other parts of the world. Well-developed international institutions and doctrines of legitimacy existed in Europe well before Wilson sailed across the Atlantic to pitch the League of Nations, which was in essence an upgraded version of preexisting European forms of international governance. Although it would take another devastating world war to ensure that Germany, as well as its Western neighbors, would adhere to the rules of a new system, Europe was already prepared for the establishment of a Wilsonian order.

But Europe’s experience has not been the global norm. Although China has been periodically invaded by nomads, and there were periods in its history when several independent Chinese states struggled for power, China has been a single entity for most of its history. The idea of a single legitimate state with no true international peers is as deeply embedded in the political culture of China as the idea of a multistate system grounded in mutual recognition is embedded in that of Europe. There have been clashes among Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans, but until the late nineteenth century, interstate conflict was rare. 

In human history as a whole, enduring civilizational states seem more typical than the European pattern of rivalry among peer states. Early modern India was dominated by the Mughal Empire. Between the sixteenth century and the nineteenth century, the Ottoman and Persian Empires dominated what is now known as the Middle East. And the Incas and the Aztecs knew no true rivals in their regions. War seems universal or nearly so among human cultures, but the European pattern, in which an escalating cycle of war forced a mobilization and the development of technological, political, and bureaucratic resources to ensure the survival of the state, does not seem to have characterized international life in the rest of the world. 

For states and peoples in much of the world, the problem of modern history that needed to be solved was not the recurrence of great-power conflict. The problem, instead, was figuring out how to drive European powers away, which involved a wrenching cultural and economic adjustment in order to harness natural and industrial resources. Europe’s internecine quarrels struck non-Europeans not as an existential civilizational challenge to be solved but as a welcome opportunity to achieve independence. 

Postcolonial and non-Western states often joined international institutions as a way to recover and enhance their sovereignty, not to surrender it, and their chief interest in international law was to protect weak states from strong ones, not to limit the power of national leaders to consolidate their authority. Unlike their European counterparts, these states did not have formative political experiences of tyrannical regimes suppressing dissent and drafting helpless populations into the service of colonial conquest. Their experiences, instead, involved a humiliating consciousness of the inability of local authorities and elites to protect their subjects and citizens from the arrogant actions and decrees of foreign powers. After colonialism formally ended and nascent countries began to assert control over their new territories, the classic problems of governance in the postcolonial world remained weak states and compromised sovereignty. 

Even within Europe, differences in historical experiences help explain varying levels of commitment to Wilsonian ideals. Countries such as France, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands came to the EU understanding that they could meet their basic national goals only by pooling their sovereignty. For many former Warsaw Pact members, however, the motive for joining Western clubs such as the EU and NATO was to regain their lost sovereignty. They did not share the feelings of guilt and remorse over the colonial past—and, in Germany, over the Holocaust—that led many in western Europe to embrace the idea of a new approach to international affairs, and they felt no qualms about taking full advantage of the privileges of EU and NATO membership without feeling in any way bound by those organizations’ stated tenets, which many regarded as hypocritical boilerplate.

EXPERT TEXPERT
The recent rise of populist movements across the West has revealed another danger to the Wilsonian project. If the United States could elect Donald Trump as president in 2016, what might it do in the future? What might the electorates in other important countries do? And if the Wilsonian order has become so controversial in the West, what are its prospects in the rest of the world? 

Wilson lived in an era when democratic governance faced problems that many feared were insurmountable. The Industrial Revolution had divided American society, creating unprecedented levels of inequality. Titanic corporations and trusts had acquired immense political power and were quite selfishly exploiting that power to resist all challenges to their economic interests. At that time, the richest man in the United States, John D. Rockefeller, had a fortune greater than the annual budget of the federal government. By contrast, in 2020, the wealthiest American, Jeff Bezos, had a net worth equal to about three percent of budgeted federal expenditures. 

Yet from the standpoint of Wilson and his fellow progressives, the solution to these problems could not be simply to vest power in the voters. At the time, most Americans still had an eighth-grade education or less, and a wave of migration from Europe had filled the country’s burgeoning cities with millions of voters who could not speak English, were often illiterate, and routinely voted for corrupt urban machine politicians.

The progressives’ answer to this problem was to support the creation of an apolitical expert class of managers and administrators. The progressives sought to build an administrative state that would curb the excessive power of the rich and redress the moral and political deficiencies of the poor. (Prohibition was an important part of Wilson’s electoral program, and during World War I and afterward, he moved aggressively to arrest and in some cases deport socialists and other radicals.) Through measures such as improved education, strict limits on immigration, and eugenic birth-control policies, the progressives hoped to create better-educated and more responsible voters who would reliably support the technocratic state.

A century later, elements of this progressive thinking remain critical to Wilsonian governance in the United States and elsewhere, but public support is less readily forthcoming than in the past. The Internet and social media have undermined respect for all forms of expertise. Ordinary citizens today are significantly better educated and feel less need to rely on expert guidance. And events including the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, the 2008 financial crisis, and the inept government responses during the 2020 pandemic have seriously reduced confidence in experts and technocrats, whom many people have come to see as forming a nefarious “deep state.”

International institutions face an even greater crisis of confidence. Voters skeptical of the value of technocratic rule by fellow citizens are even more skeptical of foreign technocrats with suspiciously cosmopolitan views. Just as the inhabitants of European colonial territories preferred home rule (even when badly administered) to rule by colonial civil servants (even when competent), many people in the West and in the postcolonial world are likely to reject even the best-intentioned plans of global institutions.

Meanwhile, in developed countries, problems such as the loss of manufacturing jobs, the stagnation or decline of wages, persistent poverty among minority groups, and the opioid epidemic have resisted technocratic solutions. And when it comes to international challenges such as climate change and mass migration, there is little evidence that the cumbersome institutions of global governance and the quarrelsome countries that run them will produce the kind of cheap, elegant solutions that could inspire public trust. 

WHAT IT MEANS FOR BIDEN
For all these reasons, the movement away from the Wilsonian order is likely to continue, and world politics will increasingly be carried out along non-Wilsonian and in some cases even anti-Wilsonian lines. Institutions such as NATO, the UN, and the World Trade Organization may well survive (bureaucratic tenacity should never be discounted), but they will be less able and perhaps less willing to fulfill even their original purposes, much less take on new challenges. Meanwhile, the international order will increasingly be shaped by states that are on diverging paths. This does not mean an inevitable future of civilizational clashes, but it does mean that global institutions will have to accommodate a much wider range of views and values than they have in the past.

There is hope that many of the gains of the Wilsonian order can be preserved and perhaps in a few areas even extended. But fixating on past glories will not help develop the ideas and policies needed in an increasingly dangerous time. Non-Wilsonian orders have existed both in Europe and in other parts of the world in the past, and the nations of the world will likely need to draw on these examples as they seek to cobble together some kind of framework for stability and, if possible, peace under contemporary conditions. 

For U.S. policymakers, the developing crisis of the Wilsonian order worldwide presents vexing problems that are likely to preoccupy presidential administrations for decades to come. One problem is that many career officials and powerful voices in Congress, civil society organizations, and the press deeply believe not only that a Wilsonian foreign policy is a good and useful thing for the United States but also that it is the only path to peace and security and even to the survival of civilization and humanity. They will continue to fight for their cause, conducting trench warfare inside the bureaucracy and employing congressional oversight powers and steady leaks to sympathetic press outlets to keep the flame alive. 

Those factions will be hemmed in by the fact that any internationalist coalition in American foreign policy must rely to a significant degree on Wilsonian voters. But a generation of overreach and poor political judgment has significantly reduced the credibility of Wilsonian ideas among the American electorate. Neither President George W. Bush’s nation-building disaster in Iraq nor Obama’s humanitarian-intervention fiasco in Libya struck most Americans as successful, and there is little public enthusiasm for democracy building abroad. 

But American foreign policy is always a coalition affair. As I wrote in my book Special Providence, Wilsonians are one of four schools that have contended to shape American foreign policy since the eighteenth century. Hamiltonians want to organize American foreign policy around a powerful national government closely linked to the worlds of finance and international trade. Wilsonians want to build a world order based on democracy, human rights, and the rule of law. Jacksonian populists are suspicious of big business and of Wilsonian crusades but want a strong military and populist economic programs. Jeffersonians want to limit American commitments and engagement overseas. (A fifth school, of which Jefferson Davis, the Confederate president, was a leading proponent, defined the U.S. national interest around the preservation of slavery.) Hamiltonians and Wilsonians largely dominated American foreign-policy making after the Cold War, but Obama began to reintroduce some Jeffersonian ideas about restraint, and after the Libyan misadventure, his preference for that approach clearly strengthened. Trump, who hung a portrait of President Andrew Jackson in the Oval Office, sought to build a nationalist coalition of Jacksonians and Jeffersonians against the globalist coalition of Hamiltonians and Wilsonians that had been ascendant since World War II. 

Even as the Biden administration steers American foreign policy away from the nationalism of the Trump period, it will need to re-adjust the balance between the Wilsonian approach and the ideas of the other schools in light of changed political conditions at home and abroad. Similar adjustments have been made in the past. In the first hopeful years of the postwar era, Wilsonians such as Eleanor Roosevelt wanted the Truman administration to make support of the UN its highest priority. Harry Truman and his team soon saw that opposing the Soviet Union was most important and began to lay the foundations for the Cold War and containment. The shift was wrenching, and Truman only just managed to extract a lukewarm endorsement from Roosevelt during the hard-fought 1948 election. But a critical mass of Wilsonian Democrats accepted the logic that defeating Stalinist communism was an end that justified the questionable means that fighting the Cold War would require. Biden can learn from this example. Saving the planet from a climate catastrophe and building a coalition to counter China are causes that many Wilsonians will agree both require and justify a certain lack of scrupulosity when it comes to the choice of both allies and tactics. 

The Biden administration can also make use of other techniques that past presidents have used to gain the support of Wilsonians. One is to pressure weak countries well within Washington’s sphere of influence to introduce various hot-button reforms. Another is to offer at least the appearance of support for inspiring initiatives that have little prospect of success. As a group, Wilsonians are accustomed to honorable failure and will often support politicians based on their (presumed) noble intentions without demanding too much in the way of success. 

There are other, less Machiavellian ways to keep Wilsonians engaged. Even as the ultimate goals of Wilsonian policy become less achievable, there are particular issues on which intelligent and focused American policy can produce results that Wilsonians will like. International cooperation to make money laundering more difficult and to eliminate tax havens is one area where progress is possible. Concern for international public health will likely stay strong for some years after the COVID-19 pandemic has ended. Promoting education for underserved groups in foreign countries—women, ethnic and religious minorities, the poor—is one of the best ways to build a better world, and many governments that reject the overall Wilsonian ideal can accept outside support for such efforts in their territory as long as these are not linked to an explicit political agenda. 

For now, the United States and the world are in something of a Wilsonian recession. But nothing in politics lasts forever, and hope is a hard thing to kill. The Wilsonian vision is too deeply implanted in American political culture, and the values to which it speaks have too much global appeal, to write its obituary just yet.

Thursday, December 31, 2020

One of the tested childhood scents, bubblegum, was considered the most familiar but also the most nostalgic, eliciting higher self-esteem, social connection, optimism, and inspiration

Psychological Implications of Nostalgic Scents of Childhood. Eirini Petratou, Nasia Paradisi, Odysseas Diamantis, Anastasios Stalikas. Psychology, Vol.11 No.12, December 2020. DOI: 10.4236/psych.2020.1112129

There is wide-ranging literature on the emotional effects of odors but, so far, little focus on scents that evoke nostalgia and their psychological functions. This study examines the effects of nostalgia-induced scents, more specifically what are the psychological implications of scents from childhood that evoke nostalgia. The test participants sampled five childhood scents, rating each scent as to the extent to which they were familiar and elicited nostalgia and positive emotions. The study found that one of the tested childhood scents, bubblegum, was considered the most familiar but also the most nostalgic, eliciting higher self-esteem, social connection, optimism, and inspiration. Our research findings on olfaction contribute to the existing small body of experimental research on olfactory nostalgia and facilitate the understanding of the psychological implications, triggers and affective response linked with nostalgia-induced scents.

Keywords: Positive Psychology, Nostalgia, Childhood Scents, Senses, Positive Emotions

5. Discussion

The results of the study provide empirical support for the fact that childhood scents can trigger nostalgia and that there are scents that evoke significantly higher nostalgia than others—bubblegum, cotton candy (see Figure 2). Also, the analysis revealed that the scent that elicited the highest nostalgia, bubblegum, (see Figure 2) triggered the highest olfactory memory (see Figure 1) showing the strong linkage between nostalgia and memory activation through olfaction (Chrea et al., 2007).

Furthermore, the study confirms the psychological functions and particularly the positive impact of scent-evoked nostalgia (Chrea et al., 2007). Specifically, the study shows strong, positive correlation between nostalgia and self-esteem, optimism, social connection and inspiration (see Table 4) (Reid, Green, Wildschut, & Sedikides, 2015).

5.1. Limitations and Future Directions

The results of this study should be considered directional since there are various factors that should be taken into consideration for future research. For example, the vast majority of the sample was women (Mage = 21).

Another important factor to consider is the category of scents that were used. It would be interesting to explore psychological functions of a broader variety of scent categories and investigate if there are differences in their psychological implications factoring in gender, age or other individual differences (i.e. personality traits).

5.2. Implications

Overall, the study could have several scientific and clinical applications. For example, mental health professionals could use childhood scents that trigger nostalgia in their interventions with clients—during the therapeutic process—to access difficult memories for trauma processing or for certain exercises of calming down (Torre, 2008).

Women were more stigmatized for being overweight when the fat came in the wrong, non-canonical, "unwomanly" shape, sometimes even more strongly stigmatizing targets with less rather than more body mass

Krems, Jaimie, and Steven L. Neuberg. 2020. “Updating Long-held Assumptions About Fat Stigma: For Women, Body Shape Plays a Critical Role.” PsyArXiv. December 30. doi:10.31234/osf.io/b6t7a

Rolf Degen's take: https://twitter.com/DegenRolf/status/1344510582104485889

Abstract: Heavier bodies—particularly female bodies—are stigmatized. Such fat stigma is pervasive, painful to experience, and may even facilitate weight gain, thereby perpetuating the obesity-stigma cycle. Leveraging research on functionally distinct forms of fat (deposited on different parts of the body), we propose that body shape plays an important but largely underappreciated role in fat stigma, above and beyond fat amount. Across three samples varying in participant ethnicity (White and Black Americans) and nation (U.S., India), patterns of fat stigma reveal that, as hypothesized, participants differently stigmatized equally-overweight or -obese female targets as a function of target shape, sometimes even more strongly stigmatizing targets with less rather than more body mass. Such findings suggest value in updating our understanding of fat stigma to include body shape and in querying a predominating, but often implicit, theoretical assumption that people simply view all fat as bad (and more fat as worse).


The prevailing orthodoxy is that single cells cannot learn; Beatrice Gelber & more recent studies suggest that such learning may be evolutionarily more widespread & fundamental to life than previously thought

Reconsidering the evidence for learning in single cells. Samuel J. Gershman et al. Dec 2020. https://gershmanlab.com/pubs/cell_learning.pdf

Abstract: The question of whether single cells can learn led to much debate in the early 20th century. The view prevailed that they were capable of non-associative learning but not of associative learning, such as Pavlovian conditioning. Experiments indicating the contrary were considered either non-reproducible or subject to more acceptable interpretations. Recent developments suggest that the time is right to reconsider this consensus. We exhume the experiments of Beatrice Gelber on Pavlovian conditioning in the ciliate Paramecium aurelia, and suggest that criticisms of her findings can now be reinterpreted. Gelber was a remarkable scientist whose absence from the historical record testifies to the prevailing orthodoxy that single cells cannot learn. Her work, and more recent studies, suggest that such learning may be evolutionarily more widespread and fundamental to life than previously thought and we discuss the implications for different aspects of biology.


Implications for the neurobiology of learning and memory

If single cells can learn, then they must be using a non-synaptic form of memory storage. The idea that intracellular molecules store memories has a long history, mainly in the study of multicellular organisms. We’ve already mentioned McConnell’s studies of planarians; similar ideas were espoused by Georges Ungar based on his studies of rodents (Ungar et al., 1968, Ungar and Irwin, 1967). These studies indicated that memories could be transferred from one organism to another by injection or ingestion of processed brain material. Clearly no synaptic information could survive such processing, so transfer could presumably only occur if the memory substrate was molecular. However, these findings were the subject of much controversy. The failure of careful attempts to replicate them led to a strong consensus against their validity and this line of research eventually died out (Byrne et al., 1966, Setlow, 1997, Smith, 1974, Travis, 1980). Nonetheless, several lines of recent work have revisited these studies (Shomrat and Levin, 2013, Smalheiser et al., 2001). For example, Bed´ ecarrats et al. (2018) showed that long-term sensitization of the siphon-withdrawal reflex ´ in Aplysia could be transferred by injection of RNA from a trained animal into an untrained animal. This study further showed that this form of transfer was mediated by increased excitability of sensory (but not motor) neurons, and depended on DNA methylation, although the study did not establish either RNA or DNA methylation as the engram storage mechanism. In another line of work, Dias and Ressler (2014) showed that fear conditioning in rodents could be transferred from parents to offspring, an effect that was associated with changes in DNA methylation. These studies not only revive the molecular memory hypothesis, but also point towards specific intracellular mechanisms. The significance of DNA methylation lies in the fact that DNA methylation state can control transcription. Thus, the set of proteins expressed in a cell can be altered by changes in DNA methylation, which are known to occur in an experience-dependent manner. For example, after fear conditioning, the methylation states of 9.2% of genes in the hippocampus of rats were found to be altered (Duke et al., 2017). As first pointed out by Crick (1984), and later elaborated by Holliday (1999), DNA methylation is a potentially stable medium for heritable memory storage, because the methylation state will persist in the face of DNA replication, thanks to the semi-conservative action of DNA methyltransferases. A related idea, put forward independently in Lisman et al. (2018), is that a stable memory could arise from the tug-of-war between enzymatic phosphorylation and dephosphorylation. In essence, the idea is to achieve stability through change: a molecular substrate maintains its activation state by means of continual enzymatic activity. Crick and Lisman suggested that this could solve the problem of molecular turnover that vexes synaptic theories of memory. Consistent with this hypothesis, inhibition of DNA methyltransferase disrupts the formation and maintenance of memory, although it remains to be seen whether methylation states themselves constitute the engram (Miller et al., 2010, Miller and Sweatt, 2007). The proposals of Crick and Lisman apply generally to enzymatic modification processes (e.g., acetylation or glycosylation) acting on macromolecules, provided 10 that the biochemical dynamics can generate the appropriate stable states (Prabakaran et al., 2012). An important distinction between the forms of dynamical information storage proposed by Crick and Lisman and the storage provided by DNA is that the latter is largely stable in the absence of enzymatic activity, under conditions of thermodynamic equilibrium. In contrast, the former typically relies on enzymatic activity and is only stable if driven away from thermodynamic equilibrium by chemical potential differences generated by core metabolic processes. In other words, the latter may accurately retain information in the absence of a cell over a substantially longer period than the former, which may lose information rapidly in the absence of supporting enzymatic activity. Another candidate medium for intracellular memory storage is histone modification. In eukaryotes, DNA is wrapped around nucleosomes, composed of histone proteins, to form chromatin. Gene transcription can be controlled by changes in the modification state (acetylation, methylation, ubiquitination, etc.) of these histones. In the cell biology literature, an influential hypothesis posits the existence of a histone “code” (Jenuwein and Allis, 2001, Turner, 2002) or “language” (Lee et al., 2010) that stores information non-genetically, although the nature of that information has been a matter of debate (Henikoff and Shilatifard, 2011, Sims and Reinberg, 2008). Early work demonstrated that learning was accompanied by increased histone acetylation in the rat hippocampus (Schmitt and Matthies, 1979), and more recent work has established that memory can be enhanced by increases in histone acetylation (Levenson et al., 2004, Stefanko et al., 2009, Vecsey et al., 2007). Bronfman et al. (2016) provide an extensive survey of the molecular correlates of learning and memory. In parallel with these findings, molecular biologists grappling with the information processing that takes place within the organism have begun to suggest that signaling networks may implement forms of learning (Csermely et al., 2020, Koseska and Bastiaens, 2017). In this respect, Koshland’s studies of habituation of signaling responses in PC12 cells, a mammalian cell line of neuroendocrine origin, are especially resonant (McFadden and Koshland, 1990). Koshland’s work was undertaken in full awareness of learning studies conducted by Kandel and Thompson in invertebrate organisms but his pioneering efforts have not been explored further. This reflects, perhaps, the intellectual distance between cognitive science and molecular biology, which the present paper seeks to bridge. The information processing demands on a single-celled organism, which must fend for itself, are presumably quite different from those confronting a single cell within a multi-cellular organism during development and homeostasis, so what role learning plays within the organism remains a tantalizing open question. 

Beatrice Gelber, though she could not have known about the specifics of DNA methylation or histone modification, was uncannily prophetic about these developments: 

This paper presents a new approach to behavioral problems which might be called molecular biopsychology... Simply stated, it is hypothesized that the memory engram must be coded in macromolecules... As the geneticist studies the inherited characteristics of an organism the psychologist studies the modification of this inherited matrix by interaction with the environment. Possibly the biochemical and cellular physiological processes which encode new responses are continuous throughout the phyla (as genetic codes are) and therefore would be reasonably similar for a protozoan and a mammal. (Gelber, 1962a, p. 166)


The idea that intracellular mechanisms of memory storage might be conserved across phyla is tantalizing yet untested. The demise of behavioral studies in Paramecia and other ciliates has meant that, despite the wealth of knowledge about ciliate biology, we still know quite little about the molecular mechanisms underlying Gelber’s findings. Nonetheless, we do know that many intracellular pathways that have been implicated in multicellular memory formation exist in ciliates (Table 1). For example, ciliates express calmodulin, MAP kinases, voltage-gated calcium channels, in addition to utilizing various epigenetic mechanisms that might be plausible memory substrates, such as DNA methylation and histone modification. In like manner, key molecular components of neurons and synapses emerged in organisms without nervous systems, including unicellular organisms (Arendt, 2020, Ryan and Grant, 2009). We believe it is an ideal time to revisit the phylogenetic origins of learning experimentally and theoretically 

White individuals have become less supportive of trade than minorities and that whites are more likely than minorities to favor trade with highly similar countries

The Racialization of International Trade. Diana Mutz  Edward D. Mansfield  Eunji Kim. Political Psychology, December 15 2020. https://doi.org/10.1111/pops.12714

Abstract: Despite their less vulnerable economic status, white individuals' attitudes toward overseas trade in the United States may have become more protectionist than those of economically disadvantaged minorities. We present results from five different studies examining two different ways in which trade may have become racialized. First, we examine the extent to which a person's racial identity is associated with levels of trade support. Second, we examine whether the predominant racial identity of a potential trading‐partner country influences people's willingness to trade with that country. Using various surveys and multiple survey experiments conducted over the past 12 years, we find that white individuals have become less supportive of trade than minorities and that whites are more likely than minorities to favor trade with highly similar countries. We suggest that minority support for trade is due to four well‐documented differences in the psychological predispositions of whites and minorities in the United States. Minorities have lower levels of racial prejudice, are lower in social dominance, and express less nationalism than whites. At the same time, there is evidence of rising ingroup racial consciousness among whites. Each of these characteristics has been independently linked to trade support in a direction encouraging greater support for trade among minorities. As the United States grows ever closer to becoming a “majority minority” nation, the racialization of trade attitudes may stimulate shifts in the likely future of America's trade relationships.


Decline in Marriage Associated with the COVID-19 Pandemic in the United States

Decline in Marriage Associated with the COVID-19 Pandemic in the United States. Brandon G. Wagner, Kate H. Choi, Philip N. Cohen. Socius, December 29, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1177/2378023120980328

Abstract: In the social upheaval arising from the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, we do not yet know how union formation, particularly marriage, has been affected. Using administration records—marriage certificates and applications—gathered from settings representing a variety of COVID-19 experiences in the United States, the authors compare counts of recorded marriages in 2020 against those from the same period in 2019. There is a dramatic decrease in year-to-date cumulative marriages in 2020 compared with 2019 in each case. Similar patterns are observed for the Seattle metropolitan area when analyzing the cumulative number of marriage applications, a leading indicator of marriages in the near future. Year-to-date declines in marriage are unlikely to be due solely to closure of government agencies that administer marriage certification or reporting delays. Together, these findings suggest that marriage has declined during the COVID-19 outbreak and may continue to do so, at least in the short term.

Keywords marriage, COVID-19, administrative data

The COVID-19 pandemic and policies to curb the spread of the virus have profoundly affected society. This article contributes to this emerging body of research a description of short-term marriage pattern changes following the onset of COVID-19. We find that fewer people are marrying in 2020 than in 2019. Observing this pattern in a variety of different settings, including a state with a limited governmental intervention (Florida), a geographically isolated state that took strong quarantine measures (Hawaii), and a large metropolitan area (DFW), suggests that this may be a common experience across the United States. Furthermore, we find a persistent deficit in marriage applications in a metropolitan area six months after the first outbreaks were noted. Taken together, our results indicate a steep decline in marriage formation in the United States following the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. This decline has thus far shown few signs of stopping, or even slowing, and leading indicators are consistent with continued declines relative to prepandemic levels.

The magnitude of the decline is too big to attribute solely to the temporary shock in the availability of marriage certification (i.e., closed governmental offices). Many local governments, including those included in this sample, continued to process marriage application throughout the pandemic. For example, in one large county in the Dallas MSA, Tarrant County (with a 2019 population of 2.1 million), marriage applications were processed every business day throughout the governor’s emergency declaration. Even in areas with more restrictive government mandates (e.g., shelter-in-place orders), restrictions have been limited in duration, resulting in relatively minor restrictions to access in governmental services like marriage licensing.

This gap is also not solely attributable to unprocessed marriage licenses. Lags between marriages and our data collection are sufficient to minimize this threat. For marriages in the DFW area, the delay between August 2020 marriages and our data collection is consistent with less than 2.5 percent undercounted marriages on the basis of the previous year’s processing timelines (Supplemental Figure 2). The actual undercount is likely even smaller because prior months are even more complete and administrative processing appears to be faster in 2020 than it was in 2019 (Supplemental Table 1), possibly because of reduced caseload. Counts of marriages in Florida are also unlikely to be dramatic undercounts. Comparing June 2020 marriages on the basis of provisional reports collected in September and October, only 21 (0.2 percent) additional marriages were added to the count of the latter, suggesting a stability of the count as we would expect given few unreported marriages. Finally, the decline in marriage applications we observe in Seattle suggests that the difference in marriages we observe between 2020 and 2019 is likely due, at least in part, to fewer couples’ seeking to marry.

Although marriages have declined in the aggregate, this outcome could have arisen from two distinct mechanisms that we are unable to differentiate. Many couples may have simply postponed marriages because of COVID-19-induced barriers to marriages, including inaccessible public services (such as county clerk offices), shuttered facilities (such as churches), travel restrictions, and the like. For others, the experience of the COVID-19 pandemic may result in foregone marriages. Researchers have documented that social shocks can produce declines in births, only some of which are recouped after postponement (Currie and Schwandt 2014), but whether such a process occurs in the context of marriage remains an open question. The extent to which delayed marriages represent a temporary delay or foregone unions will likely depend on the strength of the relationships, the duration of the pandemic, mortality rates among young adults, and other social factors, including the size of the economic fallout from COVID-19. As an institution, marriage has important implications for the well-being and health of couples and their offspring (McLanahan and Jacobsen 2015), individual behaviors (e.g., Wagner 2019), and legal protections for partners. Therefore, understanding the impact of COVID-19 on marriage formation not only showcases how the pandemic has, even if temporarily, upended key dimensions of our social life, it also highlights a wide array of potential effects of COVID-19 on adults and children. We recommend that future research with more long-term data address the extent to which these missing marriages have been delayed rather than foregone and identify the mechanisms contributing to this effect, irrespective of its duration.

Although the tenor of the findings is unmistakable, we should be clear about their implications. First, though we document a decline in the number of marriages following COVID-19, this analysis should not be taken to mean that the pandemic has upended marriage as a social institution. Our research offers the first view of how the year-to-date cumulative number of marriage transitions has changed over a short period of time. The preference for marriage among Americans been historically robust (Cherlin 2009), so future research would be necessary to explore whether the COVID-19 pandemic may have shifted the desirability, content, or meaning of marriages for those who experience them. Second, the counts of marriages we report are indicative of marriage trends but may differ slightly from final counts of marriages in these locations. As discussed above, these data are unlikely to change substantially, but early-access administrative data are inherently provisional and subject to subsequent revisions. Third, although our data cover approximately 10.4 percent of the United States population, we should be cautious in generalizing the observed decrease in marriage, because U.S. jurisdictions have varied widely in terms of pandemic experience (CDC COVID-19 Response Team 2020) and government response (Hale et al. 2020). We are also unable to disentangle the possible causes for the observed decrease in marriage. The COVID-19 pandemic has included covarying experiences: health, policy, economic, and social. In this article, we demonstrate the decrease in marriages following the outbreak of COVID-19, but future work should seek to explain the cause for the observed declines. Finally, this article represents only a first description of the short-term impacts of COVID-19 on marriage in the United States. Future work should seek to extend this description, not only geographically but further in time as the pandemic, and its response, continues to unfold.

Nonetheless, our study offers a first glimpse at the dramatic decline in the number of marriages in a variety of different settings across the United States, with varying experiences and responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. It also contributes insights to our understanding of the impact COVID-19 has had on social life. Although it is unclear whether this decline will represent a temporary delay in marriage timing or an exacerbation of the long-term trend in marriage decline, what is clear is that marriage, like many other dimensions of our social life, has been dramatically influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic.