recent research

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.

recent research

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)

recent research

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)

recent research

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.