a refreshingly candid politician...

... being honest about his dishonesty:

“We all know what to do, we just don’t know how to get re-elected after we have done it.” 

- Jean Claude Juncker, Prime Minister of Luxembourg (speaking of the Euro Crisis, but really could be speaking about any policy anywhere).

"dark" social

Ever get the feeling Facebook has taken over our online lives?

Alex Madrigal at the Atlantic thinks "social networks" only account for less than a quarter of the social web - at least when it comes to link-sharing. The rest comes from emails, chats, texts - what Madrigal calls "dark social" (because you can't track exactly where those links come from).

Social traffic to the Atlantic. For the rest of the web the percentage of "dark social" is more than 3/4ths.

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Picks from Kevin Lewis' picks:

• When faced with a moral dilemma, your heart beats faster. Or is it when your heart beats faster you're faced with a moral dilemma? (Jun Gu)
• We judge others not so much for the bad things they do - but how easily they do them. (Clayton Critcher)
• One way to get humans to act humanistically: remind them they're animals. (Matt Motyl)
• One theory about xenophobia is that it's related to fear of disease. Now you can map that theory on to our national values. (Florian van Leeuwen)
• Power improves your golf swing. (Pascal Burgmer)
• "Hard" republicans and "soft" democrats: not just descriptive metaphors. (Michael Slepian)
• All those political comments you post on Facebook? They actually have an - incremental - effect, at least when it comes to getting your friends to the polls. (Robert M. Bond)
• The reason why campaigns run TV ads: they kinda work. (Michael D. Jones)
• Tightly knit social networks make us politically stupid. (Elif Erisen)
• Making it more convenient to vote actually means more people vote. (Robert M. Stein)
• Citizens might not be such incompetent voters as we sometimes think, especially when it comes to local elections. (Lee Shaker)

what to not forget

Yesterday was September 11th, and try as hard as I could not to look at my Facebook page (okay, not very hard) I couldn't help avoiding all the reminders to "Never Forget."

Yesterday was also the second meeting in my intro to Social Psych seminar, where we get to read all the oldies but goodies in psych research. This week's discussion was Milgram's 1960's Yale study. You've almost certainly heard of it: New Haven residents innocently came in to participate in a study about "learning" and within an hour found themselves obediently administering electric shocks, starting at 15 volts and moving up to 450, to another "participant" (actually a "confederate" in on the game). Almost all participants started to be concerned when the confederated began hollering in pain and begging to be released, but most - over 60% - continued to flip the shock switch all the way up to 450, even after the screams from the confederate suddenly stopped, leading them to wonder if they had killed the guy. What's unsettling about the study is not just that so many people easily follow orders to harm another, it's that these participants look - and act - like such nice people. They're intensely concerned about the welfare of the person they're zapping, visible writhing in metaphysical pain themselves, yet they zap away.

In light of the Milgram study, I couldn't help wonder what it was I was supposed to be not forgetting on September 11th. When we hear the words "Never Forget" in reference to the Holocaust, the lesson is pretty clear; at least according to the tour guide in Israel's Holocaust museum, we're never to forget that humans, even when they appear to be at the height of civilization, are capable of horrendous acts. And, by humans, we're talking about me and you. It's the same message Milgram hoped to get across (along with Hannah Arendt and many others): it doesn't take much to turn us all (or a good 90%+ of us) into willing executioners.

But I'm pretty sure that is not what all those images of the twin towers with the words "Never Forget" were trying to tell me. I know some were saying we should never forget to honor the many innocent lives that were lost in the tragedy. But perhaps just as many don't want to forget that "bad people did something really bad to us."

I agree a noble society always remembers those who were sacrificed in its name (AQ was taking aim at all of us, and just happened to hit those 3000). But I don't understand what we gain out of remembering that some people once tried to hurt us. There's not much to learn beyond anger and paranoia. 

We're much better off remembering Milgram and, instead of hoping we can eradicate all the bad guys from the earth, being very vigilant that one day we don't become the bad guys ourselves.

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Just a few picks this week from Kevin Lewis' blog:

• Awe: it can make you less impatient, more generous with your time and more satisfied with life - all by making you feel richer in time. (Melanie Rudd)
• More evidence that dwelling on what you're grateful for can make you happier. (Steven Toepfer)
• Increase hope - and so increase your chances of reaching your goals - in 90 minutes or less. (David Feldman)

religious inconsistencies

If there is a definitive example of humans' ability to explain away factual inconsistencies in order not to disturb their belief system, it's got to be religion - as this image reminded me this morning:

You don't need to take a course in biblical exegesis (even though I did years ago - and I highly recommend you do too) to admire the creative rationalizations of Judeo-Christians (and, I'm sure, other religious believers) to justify why, for example, it makes perfect sense that we're all descended from Adam and Eve, a couple who only had sons.

But what grates is how many of those same inconsistent believers point to others and demand consistency between their holy book and their religious beliefs - for example, how some Judeo-Christians pick out passages in the Koran and claim that Islam is inherently violent. That is an inconsistency I cannot admire.

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Catching up with Kevin Lewis picks:

• Showing a picture makes any fact seem more truthy. (Eryn Newman)
• Seeing red makes us more aggressive bidders and negotiators. (Rajesh Bagchi)
• The endowment effect (the increased value we give to things we possess) is usually explained by "loss aversion." But it could be we value items more once we identify them with ourselves. (Sara Dommer)
• One way to feel like we have more time: give time away. (Cassie Mogilner)
• A one time incentive to give blood can make life-long blood donors. (Nicola Lacetera)
• Feeling powerful: it accentuates your willingness - or unwillingness - to help others, depending on your initial inclination. (Kenneth DeMarree)
• Reflecting on how much we've received doesn't make us more generous, but thinking about how much we've given does. (Adam Grant)
• Not only do we give more money to lenders who look trustworthy, we're pretty good at telling who, indeed, is trustworthy. (Jefferson Duarte)
• In trust games, giving a full history of players' past actions doesn't instill as much trust as giving a little info an adding in some competition. (Steffen Huck)
• Two-year-olds demonstrating that humans are a nice species. (Robert Hephach)
• Ten-year-olds showing how our nice instincts get enhanced when made public. (Daniel Houser)
• When it comes to cooperation game, the type of network we're playing within doesn't matter - but whether our neighbors cooperated or not in the previous round does. (Carlos Gracia-Lazara)
• Red: the universal color of love. (Andrew Elliot) And tipping. (Nicolas Gueguen)
• When our ideas about morality and facts conflict, we change the facts. (Brittany Liu)
• At least when it comes to game theory games, chimps are better strategists than humans. (Christopher Flynn Martin)
• Money - via its ability to remind us of our power and resources - may also make us more abstract thinkers. (Jochim Hansen)
• And when we're feeling powerful we respond better to abstract arguments. (Echo Wen Wan)
• We seek evidence to support our - even arbitrary - predictions, because it feels so good to be right. (Aaron Scherer)
• We're not completely bull-headed; presenting people with conflicting views makes them less assured of their original views. (Erin Beatty)
• Conservatives might not dislike blacks and gays because they're black and gay - but because they're liberal. (John R. Chambers)
• When it comes to presidential approval, charisma counts. (James Beck)
• Explaining why ruralites seem to vote against their economic interests: it's a class consciousness thing. (Katherine Cramer Walsh)
• A theory of political parties where interest groups - not party elites - call the shots. (Kathleen Bawn)
• And one where issues - not ideology - are at the root of polarization. (Ashley Jochim)
• Is simple rhetoric better at winning elections than complex rhetoric? The answer is not simple. (Lucian Gideon Conway)
• The poor's views are represented less in the GOP, but more so in the Democratic party. In the end, the poor are just as well represented as the rich. (Eric Bunner)
• The power of metaphor in politics. (Todd Hartman)

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From the great aggregator Kevin Lewis:

• Maybe over-confidence has nothing to do with self-esteem and confidence; maybe it's all about looking good. (Cameron Anderson)
• Editorial opinion leaders: more like government opinion followers. (Philip Habel)
• Political activists as thrill seekers. (Cindy Kam)
• Tracking down influentials in a social network. (Sinan Aral)
• Online politicos: more politically active in real life, but not more politically savvy. (Meredith Conroy)
• Want to start a video meme? Have a popular person seed it. (Hema Yoganarasimham.
• Jury deliberations: a little reasoned compromise and a little peer pressure. (Michelle Baddeley)
• Social conformity: broken down neural response by neural response. (Anna Shestakova)
• One way to dampen the influence of interest groups: get us all voting on the same day. (Sarah Anzia)
• Want to get your political message across? Obscure the messenger. (Christopher Weber)
• Presidential speeches are not total wastes of time - yet. (Amnon Cavari)
• Laws aimed at voter turn-out: restrictive laws tend to work; expansive laws not so much. (Melanie Springer)
• Independents may like to think they're independent thinkers, but their partisan leanings suggest otherwise. (Carlee Hawkins)
• The ambiguous effects of public funding in state elections. (Michael Brogan)
• Get-Out-The-Vote emails from independent groups have been shown to not work so well - but when GOTV emails come from government agencies it's a different story. (Neil Malhotra)
• A new study overturns previous research that suggested that once we vote for a party we tend to like that party even more. (Mikael Elinder)

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This week over at Kevin Lewis' blog:

• Milgram experiment revisited: perhaps subjects weren't passively following orders, but creatively working with a leader they identified with.
• The commitment principal exercised on hotel guests: when they symbolically commit to environmental practices at check in, they're 25% more likely to reuse their towels. (Katie Baca-Motes)
• One way to make someone pursue a goal may be to ask them to put it aside. (Kurt Carlson)
• As amnesiacs show us, remembering which candidates share our views does not happen at a conscious level. (Jason Coronel)
• What gets us to the polls on election day? Genes, for one. (Peter John Loewen) And for two. (Robert Klemmenson)
• If you want to change someone's mind on a policy, try attacking the policy's underlying values. (Kevin Blankenship)
• Policy and participation: a review of how the two impact each other. (Andrea Louise Campbell)
• More evidence that non-partisans, especially those less savvy, are more open to persuasion - in this case, from interest groups. (Gregory Nedenriepp)
• Good news for deliberative democracy: those more confident in their views are those most likely to change them. (Julia Albarracin)
• The post-debate rap session: when focused on who won (versus who held what policy) and gains in policy understanding are lost. (Raymond Pingree)
• Inter-citizen discussions matter: how they influenced Polish citizens' support of intervention in Iraq. (Elizabeth Radziszewski)
• Expanding our "moral circle" (how many people we think worthy of moral consideration) makes us better environmentalists. (Broyka Bratanova)

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Highlight's from Kevin Lewis' blog:

• A model for how society might want to make it's rules: legislated rules are too unwise; social rules are too rigid; but private rules are just right. (Peter Leeson)
• The power of protests: taking advantage of different weather conditions, researchers show how states with bigger Tax Day Tea Party rallies (in sunny states) rather than small rallies (where it rained on Tax Day) ended up with bigger Tea Party gains on election day. (Andreas Madestam) This Michael Bailey study concurs that activism is what counts.
• Americans like the idea of direct democracy - unless they are asked ballot questions and don't have a college degree. (Loren Collingwood)
• Political polarization may not be all bad: it might make politicians less corrupt and keep them on their toes. (Cecelia Testa)
• Mandatory voting may get you more faith in the legitimacy of government, but it won't increase civic engagement. (Krister Lundell)
• When it comes to violations of human rights in the name of security, courts - not legislatures - are the only check. (Benedikt Goderis)
• Maybe citizens in majoritarian democracies (like the US and UK) are just destined to be more dissatisfied than those in proportional representation democracies (like most of Europe). (Julian Bernauer)
• Are voters staying home on election day because they think they're poorly informed - and so that it's best to leave the election to the better informed? (Joseph McMurray)
• We're not so easily bought: thank you gifts from charities decrease giving (George Newman), while deals from companies for targeted customers can decrease sales (Yu Wang).
• When making your donation pitch, don't mix altruistic and egotistic arguments. (Daniel Feiler)
• We're not the only ones who have to worry about our reputation: orangutans and chimpanzees also make judgments on who to trust based on observation. (Esther Herrmann)
• Inducing generosity: all it takes is a quote. (Celine Jacob)
• Birds of a feather may not be drawn together; they may just be the only ones willing to talk with each other. (David Schaefer)
• We become more cooperative when we can communicate. That may just be because we can set the social norms. (William Baum)
• But social norms (or in the case of this study, the "framing of norms"), may only work when individuals' reputations haven't been established. (Tore Ellingsen)
• Usually the more people are involved in public associations, the more they have a generalized sense of social trust - but that's not so much the case when there's a big gap between rich and poor. (Chan-ung Park)
• First come, first preferred: we tend to like the first (of anything) we come across. (Dana Carney)
• It's been known that when we think abstractly a number of things happen - including we become more tolerant of other groups. Paradoxically, though, we also tend to follow our own group's social norms more. (Alison Ledgerwood)

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Pickings from Kevin Lewis' blog this week:

• Getting the cold-shoulder is more than metaphor. (Hans IJzerman)
• Hanging out with the right crowd will get you to college. (Steven Alvarado)
• Thinking abstractly (as opposed to concretely) makes us more tolerant of cultural minorities, but not racial minorities or dominant groups. (Jamie Luguri)
• One of my favorite effects, motivated reasoning, as applied to beliefs that Obama is Muslim. (Todd Hartman)
• Incivility online: it may get more people participating, but it also leaves us more close-minded. (Porismita Borah)
• If you have a logical argument, keep it brief. If, on the other hand, is full of BS you're better off rambling on a bit. (Evan Heit)

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This week's picks via Kevin Lewis:

• Not that we should hand out sub-prime mortgages or anything - but home ownership has the benefit of increasing civic participation. (Kim Manturuk)
• Freedom of Information laws are designed to improve governance - but they may do the reverse, at the same time as increasing perceptions of corruption. (Samia Taveres)
• Wikipedia: politically balanced on the whole, though individual pages remain biased. (Shane Greenstein)
• Netizens may harp about privacy - but consumers don't seem to care one lick (Alastair Beresford), although if you're running an online marketing study you're better off asking for less personal info (Avi Goldfarb).
• A paper arguing that more informed citizens would make different decisions. (Jason Ross Arnold)
• An economist models representative and direct democracy - and shows why they wouldn't make similar decisions. (Katherine Baldiga)
• How sharing information via markets can help us pick better candidates. (Boris Maciejovski)

the wisdom of heuristics

Yesterday my friend Bernstein was wondering why it is that modern day humans seem so bad at assessing relative risks. 

While there's a mushrooming field of psychology that details how our many cognitive biases make us poor natural statisticians, there are good reasons for our brains not to operate in strictly Bayesian ways. 

For one, our brains were designed in a time when relevant numbers rarely went above 150 (the number of people we were likely to encounter in life). 

More importantly, back when we all lived on the Savannah, genes would do well to err on the side of being overly-cautious. 

The example I gave Bernstein was how you wouldn't really care about sample size or the denominator of a trend when it came to lions: seeing one friend mauled by a lion would be evidence enough that avoiding lions was a good idea. But today I bumped into an xkcd comic that illustrates how, even today, we're more often better off not thinking like scientists or statisticians:

By the way, for one of the best overviews of how our illogical minds do a good job of simulating logic most of the time, take in Kathryn Schultz's Being Wrong.

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Random pickings via Kevin Lewis' blog:

• Morality: so easy to forget when we cheat - or have the ability to do so. (Lisa Shu)
• Being aware of cognitive biases doesn't help much getting rid of them. 
• One reason we long for the "good ol' days": we're really longing for our more youthful, with-it self.
• More evidence that sticky advertising - online at least - works. (Qian Xu)
• The latest on whether Facebook is good or bad for us: it is for our self-esteem. (Brittany Gentile)
• Another reason to be compassionate about your own faults: you're more likely to then improve them. (Juliana Breines)
• If you care about the well-being of your fellow citizen, vote Democrats into office. Or give them an iPod.
• The cognitive-social cycle of media multitasking: why we multitask media consumption even though it leaves us cognitively dissatisfied. (Zheng Wang)

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This week via Kevin Lewis:

• Social networks studies have shown that obesity is "contagious" - now, unsurprisingly, there's evidence that teenage smoking is contagious too.
• But when it comes to House representatives, at least, physical proximity doesn't make policy views contagious.(Jon Rogowski)
• Trust and civicness are, in part, learned from mom and dad. (Martin Ljunge)
• Oxytocin, the love drug: now proven to: make us more likely to open up to strangers (Anthony Lane) and increase our ability to read emotions while dilating our eyes (Siri Leknes).
• Interesting, if tautological, paper on why we talk about our feelings so much: it makes us feel good. (Diana Tamir)
• We sacrifice for friends depending on how close we feel to them, but we sacrifice for family purely based on genetic ties. (Oliver Curry)
• When it comes to neighborhood satisfaction, feeling connected to your neighbors matters. (Andrea Dassopoulos)
• The size of our social networks through the years. (Cornelia Wrzus)
• Need to overcome social anxiety? Try some random acts of kindness. (Lynn Alden)
• How to be happy with your friendships: be popular or be pro-social. (Astrid Poorthuis)
• How to build solidarity in a group: make the benefits of exchanges group wide (a la Freecycle), rather than one-on-one (Craigslist). Robb Willer
• Another study on the virtuous cycle if friendships, pro-socialness and health from team Fowler Christakis.
• Social ostracism sucks: no matter who you are. (Melissa McDonald)

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This week from Kevin Lewis' blog:

• Even though Malcolm Gladwell may beg to differ, the Arab Spring may not have happened without Facebook.
• Then again, a field experiment in Tanzania suggests the internet may demotivate citizens.
• And nothing affects political participation quite like the weather.
• Good cop, bad PAC: attack ads work best when they come from outside a politician's campaign. They also don't have to be very strong to be just as effective as positive ads.
• Voters do care about accountability - at least in the lab.
• Bad news for fiscal conservatives and republicans: more federal spending increases voter turnout and the popularity of incumbent presidents (especially liberal ones).
• Inferring how citizens will vote based on their notions of their economic prospects may be a circular project.
• One issue voters are unsurprisingly emotional about: where sex offenders live.
• One theory on why campaigns matter: they filter and impact how we interpret events.
• One consequence of deliberative democracy: more diverse policy stands? Maybe not, if you think voters aren't listening to politicians in the first place.
• Primary momentum: its importance is not a figment of campaigns' imaginations. It's almost as important as early media attention.
• Then again, it's not clear if long drawn out primaries are better or worse for all concerned.
• Voters might be open to new information and new views - that is if they would choose to notice them in the first place.
• Changing minds through "experience taking."

Sunday morning PETA philosophizing

Another fascinating article suggests that humans became the world's top dogs in large part because of their co-evolution with actual dogs:

"Domesticating dogs clearly improves humans’ hunting success and efficiency—whether the game (or the dog) is large or small. The same must have been true in the Paleolithic. If Neandertals did not have domestic dogs and anatomically modern humans did, these hunting companions could have made all the difference in the modern human–Neandertal competition."

I've never been a proponent of animal-rights (I usually figure we should get human rights taken care of first), but if certain species co-evolved with us and are responsible for our survival and good fortune, you can kind of argue that those species are us. That is, if humans wouldn't exist without dogs, that makes our two species almost one meta-species. If that's the case, then dogs might deserve at least a few of our rights.

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This week's picks from Kevin Lewis' blog:

• Being stressed makes us more likely to feel and act kindly toward our fellow man.
• Getting humans to fear other groups... who wear different color t-shirts.
• Our reaction to being social outcasts depends on whether the in-group has explicitly rejected us or just doesn't realize we exist. But no matter how much we're feeling left out, money can help dull the pain.
• One way to get extremists moderate their views: get them to think in the abstract rather than the concrete.
• Evidence that people actually saw the emperor's new clothes: people's experience of poems improves when they think they're from famous authors.
• Scientific education may enlighten us to how the world actually works, but that doesn't mean we entirely give up our unscientific notions.
• Your mamma was right: those kids could be a bad influence on you.
• Studies have shown that when people are feeling morally good about themselves they are less likely to do moral things. You can even induce that effect by eating organic food.
• When it comes to moral situations, we tend to like the idea of taking moral action but not necessarily following through ourselves.
• We are, by and large, moral consequentialists.
• Laughter comes to the self-aware. (But it may just be the authors were testing self-aware humor.)
• Locke was not alone in his instinct: we all tend to link ownership with those who have worked to earn it.
• Woah. Much of cognitive and social psychology today is based on the premise that brains should do good jobs of approximating statistical reality. These guys suggest that's a bunch of bunk.

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More social science finds from Kevin Lewis:

•  I know it sometimes seem like leaders are self-serving egotists: but they may have more of a social conscience than the rest of us.
• Think the country is polarizing? It's just you.
• Republicans have long been credited (or accused) of campaigning to constituent emotions. It may be they can't help it.
• Celebrity endorsements may not change who you vote for, but they will affect how you feel about political parties.
• Political trust: a matter of media attention?
• Partisans tend to consume media through partisan lenses - but sometimes they can be caught off guard.
• Compared to letters to the editor, online comments run a longer gamut in terms of tone and opinion.
• Online deliberators - more male, more moderate, more negative and, in the end, less likely to convert deliberation into action.
• When our desires conflict with what we know we should do, desire wins out 17% of the time.
• Are machiavellian people machiavellian because they have the social skills to be so?
• Personalized persuasion gets academic.
• More evidence that going with your gut can often beat thinking. Or, more specifically, thinking like a Baysian.
• We've all experienced it. Now there's a study on how it's so much easier to make a choice for someone else than it is for ourselves.
• Policy makers like to talk about how people like lots of choices; but it may just be that - self-efficacious - policy makers like more choice.
• Be very wary of all the social psychology research above: most likely the researchers fudged their data to get the results they expected.

inattentional obliviousness

A potentially stomach-churning story in the news today: the teen who recently was rescued after drifting at see for 28 days is now suing Princess Cruise Lines - for allegedly sailing by him and his two friends on the 16th day of his ordeal. (His two skiff-mates were alive at that point but did not make it to the 28th day.)

The worst explanation for this painful story is simply that the ship saw the castaways but did not want to bother picking them up. But this is unlikely. Sailors have a strong ethic of the sea; if a member of the crew were to have seen the drifters they certainly would have done the right thing. As for the passengers, all humans - especially Americans - are just not callous enough to let people perish. We can be a self-absorbed and selfish race of people, but we love being heroic - particularly when it's relatively safe and easy to be so.

The more likely - and least upsetting -explanation is just that no one saw the teens' motor boat. That the drifters could see the cruise ship - and even the passengers on it - is not a surprise. The cruise ship is not only a bit bigger than the teens' fishing boat; more importantly, the teens were looking for a boat to, of course, save them. Passengers on the tourist ship would not be similarly looking for a small boat adrift at see; even if the boat had been visible to tourists on deck, by virtue of not looking for a small boat they may not have "seen" it. This is a phenomenon psychologists call "inattentional blindness." In essence, we see what we are looking for - or what we expect to see. If you're a Hitchhiker's Guide fan, you'll be familiar with this concept as the spaceship you cannot see because you're not expecting to see a spaceship. In real life, it happens often with lifeguards who often don't see bodies lying at the bottom of pools. 

Another likely - but more disturbing - explanation is that passengers did see the teens' motor boat, but it didn't occur to them that there was anything to alert the crew about. This is the theory that makes my heart sink. I don't know how far out the cruise ship was, but it must have been far enough for there not to be land in sight, nor sight of any other boat. Is it possible that passengers saw a small boat in the middle of the sea and not one thought "that is odd, what is such a small boat doing out in the middle of nowhere?" - and were not even curious enough to ask a crew member if that might be cause for concern? I, sadly, believe it is entirely possible. It's what I'd call "inattentional obliviousness" - the idea that if someone is not standing up and screaming "there's a problem here!" everyone assumes everything is smooth sailing.

Next day addendum: Turns out I was pretty much wrong about everything - about the tourists not seeing the boat and not imagining anything was wrong and, most worrisome, about what the crew would do if they knew about a boat in distress. At least according to NPR.

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This week's picks from Kevin Lewis' blog:

• Online discussion groups aren't just for the devoted netizens: they're also a good proxy for the nation's emotions and positions on policy.
• When it comes to liars, it really does take one to know one. 
• Want some good advice? Don't ask others - instead, ask yourself what others would advise.
• Asking someone to take an other's perspective usually increases tolerance of other groups - but not if that someone deeply identifies themselves with their own group. (See article listed at bottom.)
• Fundraisers, take note: people give more when they remember how good they felt after last time they gave.
• The Ultimatum Game is famous for showing that humans have an innate sense of fairness; but apparently we tolerate more unfairness when dealing with others from our own group.
• Evolutionary theorists speculate on how our sense of fairness piggy-backed on other human traits.
• Researchers gingerly suggest one cause of atheism: the ability to think analytically. But then, most of us are able to believe in the scientific and the supernatural at the same time.
• You think interest groups distort national politics? It could be worse at the state level.
• Government transparency and citizen participation usually go hand in hand, although  one does not necessarily lead to the other.
• Fears from hunter gatherer times that still linger: we perceive our enemies to be physically closer than they are; and 100 is still the most dreadful number of deaths we can imagine. 
• Southern men have been long known to react more strongly to affronts to their "honor." Unsurprisingly that 18th century mentality extends to their views on terrorists.
• Another study on the ingrained linkage between fear of disease and fear of foreigners - this time as evidenced by how we perceive foreign accents.
• Need a little more punch in your fear ad? Add a little humor. Or disgust.
• A psycho-social explanation for one of human's more distasteful behaviors: scapegoating.

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This month via Kevin Lewis:

• Speeding up thought leaves you with riskier choices. While speeding up events makes us overrate their negative risks.
• Be careful which article you read first in the morning news; it'll shape what you remember in the articles that follow.
• Why our hypotheses seem so much more likely to be true than others.
• Everyone wants the underdog to win.
• Tip for sanitation departments: people are less likely to litter when they smell a clean scent.
• We're more likely to think something is true if its evidence comes in a row, rather than scattered.
• More evidence that clannishness and xenophobia is a left-over evolutionary tactic to avoid disease.
• When trying to debunk a myth, it's best not to do so too forcefully.
• Critically reporting the news - rather than giving a "he said/she said" telling - makes viewers more confident in their own understanding, but also more cynical.
• Social psychologists already know we have a way of liking things we already have - but there's also evidence we like things more if we think we're going to have them. It's also not just things we prefer when they're our own - but ideas.
• Prospect theory - which says we're more / less risk averse depending on how risks are framed - might have reverse results when you add a social context.
• Happy faces mess with our probabilistic judgment. But a happy mood may do the reverse.
• We process information faster - when it fits into the same, coherent picture.
• A study on the effectiveness of good behavior campaigns.
• Another study suggesting bigotry is a left-over strategy to avoid disease - this time comparing country and states with different levels of "parasite-stress."
• Trust and honesty could be casualties of economic inequality - as evidenced by google searches. Or just poverty.
• Just thinking of shopping can make us unhappy. (Study is also cool in showing how it doesn't take much to nudge people to behave more self vs. group-interested.)
• New theory on why depression hasn't been evolved out of the human genome: it protects us against pathogens.
• We are more defined by the experiences we buy than the things we buy.
• One explanation for Kansas: we shape our political views on our hopes for our future financial selves.
• Political psychology talks a lot about values, those deep preferences that help form our identity: but "sacred" values take values to a whole new level of intensity.
• Design matters: how suburban design affects civic participation.
• How big is your social network? Just measure your orbital prefrontal cortex.
• Participating in online communities makes us more financially risk-seeking - apparently because we're feeling that social safety net.
• Memory is necessary for cooperation in groups - but only in limited doses.
• Guilt feels awful for the individual - but it's good for the group.
• When one vote can shift voters' perception of your ideology.
• How can we get lawmakers to be more bipartisan and practical? Pay less attention.
• Education makes us more opinionated and ideological - but intelligence moves us toward the center.
• The blogosphere is shifting political discourse - but differently so for the left and right.
• Contrary to popular belief, we rarely vote in our self-interest - but college kids with tuition loans may be an exception.
• Direct democracy (ballot initiatives, etc.) is supposed to be a politically equalizing force - but that's not the way it pans out, at least for minorities in California. It might just be a way to keep the status quo.
• More evidence that political participation is addictive.
• People are more likely to vote if it's easier to do so.
• Imagining yourself in some-one else's shoes does indeed make us a little more empathetic.

recent research

This week in Kevin Lewis' blog:

• Where does our morality come from? Not Kant.
• How to increase helping behavior online: show a name or a webcam.
• Researchers explain the psychology behind the pot calling the kettle black.
• More evidence that, when it comes to disagreements, what really riles people are a challenge to their values, not their personal interests.
• We also tend to understand that people act on their values.
• Although, if we think folks have different political values, we lose some fundamental visceral feelings of empathy for them. (We likewise lose empathy for those we deem lower status.)
• Then again, that lack of empathy can be partially overcome by "perspective giving" and "perspective taking." Or other "communality-focused" exercises.
• A theory of minority employment discrimination - based not on stereotypes, but on how we calculate the odds of finding top notch candidate.
• A peek into the future: how kids relate to - and partly humanize - interactive robots.
• Want to encourage creativity? Put workers in multicultural pairs. And flash some green (the color, not money) at them.
• Sometimes we like new things, but often we prefer the old an familiar: it may depend on whether we're in growth mode or feeling insecure.

recent research

More from the rolls of Kevin Lewis' blog:

• If you want to capture a little more self-control, just think of money.
• Natural (and other) disasters may make us all a little dumber. (But don't take these results to heart - they're based on a study of 16 people.)
• Snakes and guns: a study in how threats to our ancestors get translated into threats today.
• How we self-segregate - even when we don't necessarily want to.
• We prefer masculine vs. feminine leaders depending on whether or not we're at war.
• Why do institutions look so similar across the globe? Maybe it's because humans like them to be that way.
• America in Italians' eyes: father figure or nation of barbarians, depending on ones political orientation.
• Is democracy good for us? Only in the grand historical sweep of things...
• But whether or not democracy makes us wealthy, wealth tends to make us democratic.
• Before Facebook, hunter gatherers had social networks of their own. And they looked surprisingly similar.
• Foraging robots help explain why groups develop certain communication systems: they balance efficiency and robustness.
• A new entrant into the club of "what makes us human" theories: our brain's development of "frontal feedback".
• There's evidence that we become smarter about predictions when real money is on the line - but that's not the case when it comes to optimistic football fans.
• Low on glucose? You're conscious thinking powers may fail on you - but, don't worry, your unconscious thinking has you covered.
• There's evidence groups can make us collectively dumber: now they're saying pairs may do the same.
• Want to emphasize differences in performance? Use small numbers.
• Get creative: try to experience unexpected unusual events. Or decrease your latent inhibition. Or practice the generic parts technique.
• Anxiety can make us more vigilant and aware, but it also debilitates performance.
• The risk of finding explanations for inconsistencies: you may start missing inconsistencies altogether.
  
• Fines can get us to change our behavior - but only for a limited time.
  
• Ideologues create God in their ideological image.
• The newest installment in the Jonathan Haidt's five fundamental values theory: they do a good job of picking people's preferences on issues like immigration, abortion and same-sex marriage.
• When we're freaked out by death (ie "mortality salience" is high), we have a harder time understanding reading passages that conflict with our views.
• Curiosity: an antidote to aggression.
• An argument for matching campaign funds, using NYC as a model.
• Representative democracy may not be perfect, but given voters' "bounded rationality" it may be better than pure democracy or technocracy.
• Interest groups on not just good for lobbying - they also stimulate civic participation.
• Conservatives may not be happier because they're "system justifiers" - but because they can afford to be part of more groups.
• We look up to people who break the rules - as long as they're doing so to benefit the group.
• How big is someone's Facebook network? Just check the size of their "temporal sulcus".
• Humans are a cooperative species; one of the reasons we are (or can be) so is because we're so diverse.
• I'm not going to pretend I understand this, but public information can make us worse off when we're also picking up private information.
• Peers go to colleges their peers prefer.
• Want to keep free-riders in your group in line? Disapproval works better than approval. So do small penalties.

recent research

Notable articles from Kevin Lewis's log this week:

• America's hedometer: tracking our mood on Twitter.
• Facebook is good for your social well-being, unless you have low-self esteem to start with.
• Not all conflict negotiations are alike: they depend on whether you're battling over interests or values.
• A little study on how we cooperate and divide the spoils of cooperation.
• Are you shy? Your amygdala and hippocampus may just not be good at making faces feel familiar.
• When gossip is good for the group.
• We're generally conformists in groups, unless the group is made up of close friends.
• One reason groups are smarter than individuals: members actually learn from each other.
• Mixing communication, honesty and fairness to figure out when cooperation is produced.
• A neat little synopsis on all the reasons societies gain from - and so evolved to enforce - monogamy.
• An Oprah endorsement is worth approximately 1,000,000 votes.
• Does election day registration help Democrats or Republicans more? At least for one state in 1976, it was the Republicans that got the extra boost.
• Is the political fracturing of online news sending Americans off into ideological media silos? Some evidence says no.
• One way to get rid of negative ads: increase the number of candidates.
• The incredible short term memory of voters during campaign season.
• Ballot propositions can make voters smarter - but only if it's a social proposition. Or maybe all they're doing is polarizing voters.
• About how much does requiring voters to register decrease overall turnout? 2%.
• More evidence that our behavior determines our values (rather than values directing behavior) - this time among Belgian teens.
• A politically divided house doesn't necessarily fall, but it does create more politically engaged kids.
• In Finland at least, adding a couple years of required education doesn't increase citizen participation.
• But going "mobile" - if you happen to have a large network - can make you more politically involved.

when academics need to take a step back

Ivory towers are well known to have a distorting effect on academics' relationship to reality. Even so, the occasional study seems so distorted it deserves special note:

Trial by Battle, Peter Leeson, Journal of Legal Analysis, Spring 2011

Abstract: For over a century England's judicial system decided land disputes by ordering disputants' legal representatives to bludgeon one another before an arena of spectating citizens. The victor won the property right for his principal. The vanquished lost his cause and, if he were unlucky, his life. People called these combats trials by battle. This paper investigates the law and economics of trial by battle. In a feudal world where high transaction costs confounded the Coase theorem, I argue that trial by battle allocated disputed property rights efficiently. It did this by allocating contested property to the higher bidder in an all-pay auction. Trial by battle's "auctions" permitted rent seeking. But they encouraged less rent seeking than the obvious alternative: a first-price ascending-bid auction. (italics mine)

Why, oh why, Peter would you bother to argue such a thing?

recent research

Keeping up with Kevin Lewis' log of recent research:

• Our sacred values - like other rules - are generally not up for sale.
• It really is the thought that counts - whether we're punishing free-riders, condemning the schadenfreuders, or enjoying the sweet taste of a gift.
• The loser's paradox: take a losing strategy, add in some fear, and you get more losing strategy.
• We're better at predicting others' behavior than our own.
• You're not imagining it: people are more likely to remember "that one time" you messed up.
• Raising money for a worthy cause? You may want make it hurt. Or get prospective donors to think of their childhood. Or be sure to focus on the somewhat rich and forget about the mega-rich. Or get them to do something exceptional or odd first. And don't forget to give your donors public recognition.
  
• Money changes everything - even if you're in kindergarten.
• Do people give to charities for the "warm glow" it gives them - or because they feel uncomfortable saying no? It's not the warm glow.
• Not sure why you would do this, but if you're ever thinking of subsidizing sharing, think again.
• More evidence that we're not really good at assessing our politicians' performances.
• Good news from the campaign front! We're more likely to hear positive campaign themes.
• Want to cut back on pork? Try term limits.
• Do voters prefer professionalized legislatures? Depends on their ideology.
• High voter turn-outs are great - unless you don't like budget deficits. Then again, deficits may not be a risk if voters are electing highly popular parties.
• Want to be smarter? Stop all that thinking and go with your gut. Pour yourself a drink.
• If life is a box of chocolates, we should live each day as if we're eating the last truffle.
• Groups are often thought to stifle creativity - but that may depend on how creative the groups are.
• Need to persuade someone? Try asking them to pretend to support some other random proposition first.
• How to get crowds to be wise about complex problems.
  

nice guys vs. jerks and representativeness

"Nah, I can't wear my glasses out. They make me look nice - and everyone knows girls don't want to date nice guys. Women like the bad boys."

This is my neighbor Andrew giving me that tired, woeful explanation for the seeming success of jerks that so many New York men (nice and not nice) take as gospel. After recovering from the profound despair such misconceptions hurl me into - I pulled out a pen, grabbed a napkin and marshaled the teachings of Daniel Kahneman to set Andrew straight. I thought it a worthwhile service for the single women of New York to likewise educate other men:

Women don't like jerks. They do like cool, confident. Ask any woman. This is god's truth.

What confuses men off is what Kahneman calls the Representativeness Heuristic. Men (and, yes, women) don't tend to think like statisticians; instead we make categorizations based on correlations. (In their most insidious forms these categorizations are called prejudices, but usually they're less harmful.) Andrew, like many of his sex, was categorizing "bad boys" (or "jerks" as I'll call them) as "cool" and "nice guys" as "uncool."

Andrew's View

Now, Andrew isn't necessarily wrong about this categorization. Let's even say he's right: jerks do tend to be cool and nice guys uncool.

But that still doesn't mean women like jerks. What happens is that nonconfident, uncool guys (the kind of guys women don't, in fact, like) almost always are nice. This is so because they don't really have a choice; if you're unconfident and a jerk, you don't even get a first date. Cool, confident guys, however, have a choice: they can be nice guys or jerks.

Let's say that the world is made up of 50% confident guys and 50% nonconfident. To keep our model simple, assume all of the uncool guys will be nice guys, but that 50% of the cool guys will be nice and 50% will be jerks. You get the picture below.


You can see that most of the nice guys, yes, do happen to be uncool, while virtually all of the jerks are confident. Thus the misleading heuristic of "nice=uncool".

But don't be fooled, gents. Ladies will put up with the cool, confident jerks, but what we all want - and what I humbly recommend you aspire to be - is the cool, confident, nice guy.