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Sunday, October 12, 2014
With friends like you
Morphological and population genomic evidence that human faces have evolved to signal individual identity
Michael Sheehan & Michael Nachman
Nature Communications, September 2014
Facial recognition plays a key role in human interactions, and there has been great interest in understanding the evolution of human abilities for individual recognition and tracking social relationships. Individual recognition requires sufficient cognitive abilities and phenotypic diversity within a population for discrimination to be possible. Despite the importance of facial recognition in humans, the evolution of facial identity has received little attention. Here we demonstrate that faces evolved to signal individual identity under negative frequency-dependent selection. Faces show elevated phenotypic variation and lower between-trait correlations compared with other traits. Regions surrounding face-associated single nucleotide polymorphisms show elevated diversity consistent with frequency-dependent selection. Genetic variation maintained by identity signalling tends to be shared across populations and, for some loci, predates the origin of Homo sapiens. Studies of human social evolution tend to emphasize cognitive adaptations, but we show that social evolution has shaped patterns of human phenotypic and genetic diversity as well.
Delinquency and Peer Acceptance in Adolescence: A Within-Person Test of Moffitt's Hypotheses
Kelly Rulison, Derek Kreager & Wayne Osgood
Developmental Psychology, forthcoming
We tested 2 hypotheses derived from Moffitt's (1993) taxonomic theory of antisocial behavior, both of which are central to her explanation for the rise in delinquency during adolescence. We tested whether persistently delinquent individuals become more accepted by their peers during adolescence and whether individuals who abstain from delinquent behavior become less accepted. Participants were 4,359 adolescents from 14 communities in the PROSPER study, which assessed friendship networks and delinquency from 6th (M = 11.8 years) to 9th (M = 15.3 years) grade. We operationalized peer acceptance as number of nominations received (indegree centrality), attractiveness as a friend (adjusted indegree centrality), and network bridging potential (betweenness centrality) and tested the hypotheses with multilevel modeling. Contrary to Moffitt's hypothesis, persistently delinquent youths did not become more accepted between early and middle adolescence, and although abstainers were less accepted in early adolescence, they became more accepted over time. Results were similar for boys and girls; when differences occurred, they provided no support for Moffitt's hypotheses for boys and were opposite of her hypotheses for girls. Sensitivity analyses in which alternative strategies and additional data were used to identify persistently delinquent adolescents produced similar results. We explore the implications of these results for Moffitt's assertions that social mimicry of persistently antisocial adolescents leads to increases in delinquency and that social isolation leads to abstention.
Beautiful friendship: Social sharing of emotions improves subjective feelings and activates the neural reward circuitry
Ullrich Wagner et al.
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, forthcoming
Humans have a strong tendency to affiliate with other people, especially in emotional situations. Here, we suggest that a critical mechanism underlying this tendency is that socially sharing emotional experiences is in itself perceived as hedonically positive and thereby contributes to the regulation of individual emotions. We investigated the effect of social sharing of emotions on subjective feelings and neural activity by having pairs of friends view emotional (negative and positive) and neutral pictures either alone or with the friend. While the two friends remained physically separated throughout the experiment - with one undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging and the other performing the task in an adjacent room - they were made aware on a trial-by-trial basis whether they were seeing pictures simultaneously with their friend (shared) or alone (unshared). Ratings of subjective feelings were improved significantly when participants viewed emotional pictures together than alone, an effect that was accompanied by activity increase in ventral striatum and medial orbitofrontal cortex, two important components of the reward circuitry. Because these effects occurred without any communication or interaction between the friends, they point to an important proximate explanation for the basic human motivation to affiliate with others, particularly in emotional situations.
Balancing Competing Motives: Adaptive Trade-Offs Are Necessary to Satisfy Disease Avoidance and Interpersonal Affiliation Goals
Donald Sacco, Steven Young & Kurt Hugenberg
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
The current research provides novel evidence for motivational trade-offs between the two fundamental human goals of pursuing social affiliation and avoiding disease. In Study 1, participants completed a writing prime that manipulated inclusionary status and found that socially excluded participants indicated lower feelings of current disease susceptibility compared with control and socially included participants. In Study 2, participants were included or excluded via Cyberball and then indicated their preferences for symmetrical versus asymmetrical faces. Socially excluded participants displayed lower preferences for symmetrical faces - a cue associated with greater disease resistance. Finally, in Study 3, participants were primed with either disease threat or a general negative affective state and then indicated their current affiliation interest. Activated disease concerns uniquely led participants to display less interest in social affiliation. Taken together, affiliation needs result in disease avoidance down-regulation to aid reaffiliation, whereas disease concerns result in affiliation down-regulation to facilitate pathogen avoidance.
The Influence of Ethnic Community Knowledge on Indian Inventor Innovativeness
Paul Almeida, Anupama Phene & Sali Li
Organization Science, forthcoming
This paper investigates the knowledge influences of the ethnic community on the quality of innovations of Indian immigrant inventors in the U.S. semiconductor industry. Membership in the Indian ethnic community enables inventors to source knowledge from, and to collaborate with, others in the community. By analyzing patent data, we find that the utility of ethnic knowledge and collaborators depends on the level of inventor embeddedness in the community. Most inventors benefit by sourcing knowledge from, or collaborating with, other Indians and hence enhance innovation quality, but at a diminishing rate. For those who are very heavily embedded in the community, ethnic community knowledge decreases the quality of innovation. Our results provide some support for the idea that simultaneously sourcing ethnic knowledge and using ethnic collaborators also decreases innovativeness. Thus, for Indian inventors, the level of embeddedness in the community is a key factor in influencing the quality of innovation.
Social-Network Complexity in Humans Is Associated With the Neural Response to Social Information
Sarah Dziura & James Thompson
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Humans have evolved to thrive in large and complex social groups, and it is likely that this increase in group complexity has come with a greater need to decode and respond to complex and uncertain communicatory signals. In this functional MRI study, we examined whether complexity of social networks in humans is related to the functioning of brain regions key to the perception of basic, nonverbal social stimuli. Greater activation to biological than to scrambled motion in the right posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS) and right amygdala were positively correlated with the diversity of social-network roles. In the pSTS, in particular, this association was not due to a relationship between network diversity and network size. These findings suggest that increased functioning of brain regions involved in decoding social signals might facilitate the detection and decoding of subtle signals encountered in varied social settings.
Electrified emotions: Modulatory effects of transcranial direct stimulation on negative emotional reactions to social exclusion
Paolo Riva et al.
Social Neuroscience, forthcoming
Social exclusion, ostracism, and rejection can be emotionally painful because they thwart the need to belong. Building on studies suggesting that the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (rVLPFC) is associated with regulation of negative emotions, the present experiment tests the hypothesis that decreasing the cortical excitability of the rVLPFC may increase negative emotional reactions to social exclusion. Specifically, we applied cathodal transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) over the rVLPFC and predicted an increment of negative emotional reactions to social exclusion. In Study 1, participants were either socially excluded or included, while cathodal tDCS or sham stimulation was applied over the rVLPFC. Cathodal stimulation of rVLPFC boosted the typical negative emotional reaction caused by social exclusion. No effects emerged from participants in the inclusion condition. To test the specificity of tDCS effects over rVLPFC, in Study 2, participants were socially excluded and received cathodal tDCS or sham stimulation over a control region (i.e., the right posterior parietal cortex). No effects of tDCS stimulation were found. Our results showed that the rVLPFC is specifically involved in emotion regulation and suggest that cathodal stimulation can increase negative emotional responses to social exclusion.
Autism as a disorder of prediction
Pawan Sinha et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, forthcoming
A rich collection of empirical findings accumulated over the past three decades attests to the diversity of traits that constitute the autism phenotypes. It is unclear whether subsets of these traits share any underlying causality. This lack of a cohesive conceptualization of the disorder has complicated the search for broadly effective therapies, diagnostic markers, and neural/genetic correlates. In this paper, we describe how theoretical considerations and a review of empirical data lead to the hypothesis that some salient aspects of the autism phenotype may be manifestations of an underlying impairment in predictive abilities. With compromised prediction skills, an individual with autism inhabits a seemingly "magical" world wherein events occur unexpectedly and without cause. Immersion in such a capricious environment can prove overwhelming and compromise one's ability to effectively interact with it. If validated, this hypothesis has the potential of providing unifying insights into multiple aspects of autism, with attendant benefits for improving diagnosis and therapy.
"More Than Words": Social Validation in Close Relationships
Namkje Koudenburg, Ernestine Gordijn & Tom Postmes
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, November 2014, Pages 1517-1528
Conversations are susceptible to many disturbances: A speaker's hesitations, distractions, or, when communicating online, technical hiccups that may cause brief delays. Research among previously unacquainted individuals revealed that brief disruptions in conversational flow can have profound social consequences: Silences or delays in mediated communication threaten the need to belong and validate one's ideas. The present research, however, shows that when occurring in close relationships, flow disruptions may be ironically beneficial. We hypothesized that when flow disruptions occur, partners fall back on their relationship beliefs to infer mutual agreement and the existence of a shared reality. When a relationship is perceived as secure, partners may believe that "no words are needed" to understand each other. Flow disruptions can thus paradoxically make shared cognitions accessible and foster feelings of social validation. Data from two experiments, using partners in different types of relationships, supported this hypothesis.
Try to find me: Social anxiety and peer first impressions
Audrey Aiken et al.
Behavior Therapy, November 2014, Pages 851-862
Following initial interactions, other people are less willing to pursue ongoing contact with socially anxious individuals than with those who are not socially anxious. To better understand this process, we conducted two studies that examined peers' first impressions of target individuals. Unacquainted individuals (N = 104 and 114) participated in round robin, unstructured interactions in groups of 3 to 10 and then rated each partner and themselves on items reflecting the Big-5 personality dimensions. The ratings were analyzed according to Biesanz's social accuracy model of interpersonal perception (SAM; Biesanz, 2010), which distinguishes the positivity from the accuracy of social judgments. Study 1 revealed that perceivers did not view socially anxious targets more negatively or as less likeable than non-socially anxious targets but were less able to recognize their unique personality features. Study 2 replicated those findings and indicated that perceivers' difficulties recognizing socially anxious targets' unique features were not due to negative biases in the socially anxious targets' self-ratings or to general psychological maladjustment. The findings are consistent with cognitive models, which underscore the role of self-concealment in social anxiety disorder.
Oxytocin increases the likeability of physically formidable men
Frances Chen et al.
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, forthcoming
Physical size and strength are associated with dominance and threat. The current study tested (i) whether men's evaluations of male strangers would be negatively influenced by cues indicating physical formidability, and (ii) whether these evaluations would be influenced by oxytocin, a neuropeptide that mediates social behavior and reduces social anxiety. In a placebo-controlled, double-blind design, we administered either oxytocin (24 I.U.) or placebo intranasally to 100 healthy males and assessed their responses to an image of either a physically formidable (strong) or physically non-formidable (weak) male peer. Whereas participants receiving placebo expressed dislike and avoidance of the strong male relative to the weak male, oxytocin selectively improved social evaluation of the strong male. These results provide first evidence that oxytocin regulates social evaluation of peers based on body features indicating strength and formidability. We discuss the possibility that oxytocin may promote the expansion of social networks by increasing openness towards potentially threatening individuals.
"The we's have it": Evidence for the distinctive benefits of group engagement in enhancing cognitive health in ageing
Catherine Haslam, Tegan Cruwys & Alexander Haslam
Social Science & Medicine, November 2014, Pages 57-66
Aligned with research in the social capital and general health literature, a large body of evidence shows that older people who are more socially active have better cognitive integrity and are less vulnerable to cognitive decline. The present research addresses the question of whether the type of social engagement (group-based vs. individual) has differential effects on these cognitive health outcomes. Drawing on population data (N=3413) from three waves (i.e., Waves 3, 4 and 5) of the English Longitudinal Study of Aging, we investigated the independent contribution of group and individual engagement in predicting cognitive functioning four years later. Hierarchical linear regression was used entering age, gender, socioeconomic status, ethnicity, and physical health as covariates. The final model, controlling for initial cognitive function and social engagement (both group and individual) showed that only group engagement made a significant, sustained, and unique contribution to subsequent cognitive function. Furthermore, the effects of group engagement were stronger with increasing age. These findings extend previous work on the social determinants of health by pinpointing the types of relationships that are particularly beneficial in protecting cognitive health. The fact that group engagement optimized health outcomes, and that this was especially the case with increasing age, has important implications for directing community resources to keep older adults mentally active and independent for longer.
Minimizing the Pain and Probability of Rejection: Evidence for Relational Distancing and Proximity Seeking Within Face-to-Face Interactions
Kristin Sommer & Frank Bernieri
Social Psychological and Personality Science, forthcoming
Some studies have revealed evidence for proximity seeking following interpersonal rejection, whereas other studies have found evidence of relational distancing (Williams, 2007). This study examined whether both processes could occur simultaneously within face-to-face interactions. Participants were accepted or rejected by one person and then interacted with a new partner for the purposes of an impression-formation task. Conversations were recorded and transcribed. Dyads containing a previously rejected compared to accepted participant exhibited higher levels of linguistic style matching and reciprocated conversational content, suggestive of proximity seeking. However, rejected targets also rated their new partners as less kind and reported lower levels of rapport/liking for their partners, consistent with relational distancing. Partner evaluations were statistically mediated by targets' expectations of rejection. We suggest that automatic proximity seeking and the appraisal-mediated devaluation of new partners reflect efforts to minimize the potential for and pain of future rejection. Recommendations for future research are discussed.
Saturday, October 11, 2014
May the force be with you
Obama cares about visuo-spatial attention: Perception of political figures moves attention and determines gaze direction
Mark Mills et al.
Behavioural Brain Research, forthcoming
Processing an abstract concept such as political ideology by itself is difficult but becomes easier when a background situation contextualizes it. Political ideology within American politics, for example, is commonly processed using space metaphorically, i.e., the political "left" and "right" (referring to Democrat and Republican views, respectively), presumably to provide a common metric to which abstract features of ideology can be grounded and understood. Commonplace use of space as metaphor raises the question of whether an inherently non-spatial stimulus (e.g., picture of the political "left" leader, Barack Obama) can trigger a spatially-specific response (e.g., attentional bias toward "left" regions of the visual field). Accordingly, pictures of well-known Democrats and Republicans were presented as central cues in peripheral target detection (Experiment 1) and saccadic free-choice (Experiment 2) tasks to determine whether perception of stimuli lacking a direct association with physical space nonetheless induce attentional and oculomotor biases in the direction compatible with the ideological category of the cue (i.e., Democrat/left and Republican/right). In Experiment 1, target detection following presentation of a Democrat (Republican) was facilitated for targets appearing to the left (right). In Experiment 2, participants were more likely to look left (right) following presentation of a Democrat (Republican). Thus, activating an internal representation of political ideology induced a shift of attention and biased choice of gaze direction in a spatially-specific manner. These findings demonstrate that the link between conceptual processing and spatial attention can be totally arbitrary, with no reference to physical or symbolic spatial information.
Shared Experiences Are Amplified
Erica Boothby, Margaret Clark & John Bargh
Psychological Science, forthcoming
In two studies, we found that sharing an experience with another person, without communicating, amplifies one's experience. Both pleasant and unpleasant experiences were more intense when shared. In Study 1, participants tasted pleasant chocolate. They judged the chocolate to be more likeable and flavorful when they tasted it at the same time that another person did than when that other person was present but engaged in a different activity. Although these results were consistent with our hypothesis that shared experiences are amplified compared with unshared experiences, it could also be the case that shared experiences are more enjoyable in general. We designed Study 2 to distinguish between these two explanations. In this study, participants tasted unpleasantly bitter chocolate and judged it to be less likeable when they tasted it simultaneously with another person than when that other person was present but doing something else. These results support the amplification hypothesis.
Illusions of Learning: Irrelevant Emotions Inflate Judgments of Learning
Roy Baumeister, Jessica Alquist & Kathleen Vohs
Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, forthcoming
People use assessments of how much they have learned to choose and recommend instructors, seminars, and weekend trips. How do people assess how much they have learned? Recent theorizing has depicted emotion as a cue for learning, and so people may be misled by recent emotional states to infer that they have learned more than they actually have. Four studies showed that people associated emotion with learning and believed, often falsely, that they learned more when in an emotional than unemotional state. Factual lessons were coupled with manipulations of arbitrary, irrelevant emotional states. Participants rated that they learned more after an emotion had been induced than in emotionally neutral control conditions. These differences remained significant after controlling for actual learning as measured by objective tests, which was unaffected by emotion. This illusion of learning caused by emotion was robust with respect to changes of procedure and sample, including whether the emotion came before or after the information to be learned. Alternative explanations were ruled out, including that emotion would intensify ratings generally, that emotion would make incoming information seem particularly personally relevant, that emotion increased engagement in the research, and that illusory learning would depend on retrospective exaggeration of one's prior ignorance. Because irrelevant emotions can increase people's judgments that they have learned something, incidental emotional experiences could increase a person's likelihood of deciding to take another class with a particular instructor, to sign up for another leadership seminar, or to engage in a risky (but emotion-filled) excursion.
Providing Views of the Driving Scene to Drivers' Conversation Partners Mitigates Cell-Phone-Related Distraction
John Gaspar et al.
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Cell-phone use impairs driving safety and performance. This impairment may stem from the remote partner's lack of awareness about the driving situation. In this study, pairs of participants completed a driving simulator task while conversing naturally in the car and while talking on a hands-free cell phone. In a third condition, the driver drove while the remote conversation partner could see video of both the road ahead and the driver's face. We tested the extent to which this additional visual information diminished the negative effects of cell-phone distraction and increased situational awareness. Collision rates for unexpected merging events were high when participants drove in a cell-phone condition but were reduced when they were in a videophone condition, reaching a level equal to that observed when they drove with an in-car passenger or drove alone. Drivers and their partners made shorter utterances and made longer, more frequent traffic references when they spoke in the videophone rather than the cellphone condition. Providing a view of the driving scene allows remote partners to help drivers by modulating their conversation and referring to traffic more often.
Vanessa Buechner et al.
PLoS ONE, September 2014
Color research has shown that red is associated with avoidance of threat (e.g., failure) or approach of reward (e.g., mating) depending on the context in which it is perceived. In the present study we explored one central cognitive process that might be involved in the context dependency of red associations. According to our theory, red is supposed to highlight the relevance (importance) of a goal-related stimulus and correspondingly intensifies the perceivers' attentional reaction to it. Angry and happy human compared to non-human facial expressions were used as goal-relevant stimuli. The data indicate that the color red leads to enhanced attentional engagement to angry and happy human facial expressions (compared to neutral ones) - the use of non-human facial expressions does not bias attention. The results are discussed with regard to the idea that red induced attentional biases might explain the red-context effects on motivation.
Detecting Knowledge of Incidentally Acquired, Real-World Memories Using a P300-Based Concealed-Information Test
John Meixner & Peter Rosenfeld
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Autobiographical memory for events experienced during normal daily life has been studied at the group level, but no studies have yet examined the ability to detect recognition of incidentally acquired memories among individual subjects. We present the first such study here, which employed a concealed-information test in which subjects were shown words associated with activities they had experienced the previous day. Subjects wore a video-recording device for 4 hr on Day 1 and then returned to the laboratory on Day 2, where they were shown words relating to events recorded with the camera (probe items) and words of the same category but not relating to the subject's activities (irrelevant items). Electroencephalograms were recorded, and presentation of probe items was associated with a large peak in the amplitude of the P300 component. We were able to discriminate perfectly between 12 knowledgeable subjects who viewed stimuli related to their activities and 12 nonknowledgeable subjects who viewed only irrelevant items. These results have strong implications for the use of memory-detection paradigms in criminal contexts.
Advertising Memory: The Power of Mirror Neurons
Sophie Lacoste-Badie & Olivier Droulers
Journal of Neuroscience, Psychology, and Economics, forthcoming
As part of the insights of neuroscience available for the study of advertising, the concept of mirror neurons provides opportunities for new research. Mirror neurons are a particular class of visuomotor neurons in the brain that show activity both when an individual performs an action and when he observes another individual performing the same action. According to researchers in cognitive neuroscience, mirror neurons are the brain basis for learning by imitation. The observation of 2 types of movement specifically causes the mirror neurons activation: "grasping with the hand" and "bringing to the mouth." This article seeks to show that TV commercials, in which a character grabs a food product and brings it to his mouth, are more effective. To investigate this research question we designed a between-subjects experiment (n = 130) to compare the memorization of 2 versions of the same ad (featuring an unfamiliar mineral water brand). In the first ad version, the character grabs the product, while there is no contact between the product and the character in the second version. The article outlines that memory was higher in the grasping and drinking condition. Although we cannot conclusively say that the mirror neurons were activated when people saw the character grabbing the product in the ad, the literature on mirror neurons provides an explanatory framework for the observed results. In other words, this study points out that the discovery of mirror neurons is a very new concept for marketing, which can enrich our understanding of advertising processing.
Testing the snake-detection hypothesis: Larger early posterior negativity in humans to pictures of snakes than to pictures of other reptiles, spiders and slugs
Jan Van Strien, Ingmar Franken & Jorg Huijding
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, September 2014
According to the snake detection hypothesis (Isbell, 2006), fear specifically of snakes may have pushed evolutionary changes in the primate visual system allowing pre-attentional visual detection of fearful stimuli. A previous study demonstrated that snake pictures, when compared to spiders or bird pictures, draw more early attention as reflected by larger early posterior negativity (EPN). Here we report two studies that further tested the snake detection hypothesis. In Study 1, we tested whether the enlarged EPN is specific for snakes or also generalizes to other reptiles. Twenty-four healthy, non-phobic women watched the random rapid serial presentation of snake, crocodile, and turtle pictures. The EPN was scored as the mean activity at occipital electrodes (PO3, O1, Oz, PO4, O2) in the 225-300 ms time window after picture onset. The EPN was significantly larger for snake pictures than for pictures of the other reptiles. In Study 2, we tested whether disgust plays a role in the modulation of the EPN and whether preferential processing of snakes also can be found in men. 12 men and 12 women watched snake, spider, and slug pictures. Both men and women exhibited the largest EPN amplitudes to snake pictures, intermediate amplitudes to spider pictures and the smallest amplitudes to slug pictures. Disgust ratings were not associated with EPN amplitudes. The results replicate previous findings and suggest that ancestral priorities modulate the early capture of visual attention.
"Good Is Up" Is Not Always Better: A Memory Advantage for Words in Metaphor-Incompatible Locations
Elizabeth Crawford, Stephanie Cohn & Arnold Kim
PLoS ONE, September 2014
Four experiments examined whether memory for positive and negative words depended on word location and vertical hand movements. Cognitive processing is known to be facilitated when valenced stimuli are presented in locations that are congruent with the GOOD is UP conceptual metaphor, relative to when they are presented in incongruent locations. In both free recall and recognition tasks, we find a memory advantage for words that had been studied in metaphor incongruent locations (positive down, negative up). This incongruity advantage depends on the location of words during encoding, but no evidence was found to suggest that other spatial associations, such as the vertical position of the hand at encoding or word location during retrieval, affect memory. The results indicate that metaphors, like schemas, categories, and stereotypes, can influence cognition in complex ways, producing variable outcomes across different tasks.
From threat to safety: Instructed reversal of defensive reactions
Vincent Costa, Margaret Bradley & Peter Lang
Psychophysiology, forthcoming
Cues that signal the possibility of receiving an electric shock reliably induce defensive activation. To determine whether cues can also easily reverse defensive reactions, a threat reversal paradigm was developed in which a cue signaling threat of shock reversed its meaning across the course of the study. This allowed us to contrast defensive reactions to threat cues that became safe cues, with responses to cues that continued to signal threat or safety. Results showed that, when participants were instructed that a previously threatening cue now signaled safety, there was an immediate and complete attenuation of defensive reactions compared to threat cues that maintained their meaning. These findings highlight the role that language can play both in instantiating and attenuating defensive reactions, with implications for understanding emotion regulation, social communication, and clinical phenomena.
Friday, October 10, 2014
Taxed and spent
Does Transparency Lead to Pay Compression?
Alexandre Mas
NBER Working Paper, October 2014
This paper asks whether disclosing wages to the public changes wage setting at the top of the public sector income distribution. I evaluate a 2010 California mandate that required cities to submit municipal salaries to the State, to be posted on a public website. City managers - typically the highest paid employees - in cities that had not previously disclosed salaries experienced average compensation declines of approximately 8 percent relative to cities where at the time of the mandate manager wages were already in the public domain. This decline was largely accomplished through nominal pay cuts. The wage cuts were not the result of relatively greater financial stress, as the overall wage bill did not diverge between these sets of cities. Wages were cut irrespective of whether or not they were out of line with (measured) fundamentals. Consequently, the residual variance of manager wages did not decline. Following new disclosure the city manager quit rate increased by 75 percent, suggesting that transparency pressured cities to lower the wages that were already close to reservation levels. The evidence is more consistent with a "populist" response to perceptions of excessive salaries than with the effects of increased accountability.
Pass the Bucks: Credit, Blame, and the Global Competition for Investment
Nathan Jensen et al.
International Studies Quarterly, September 2014, Pages 433-447
Both countries and subnational governments commonly engage in competition for mobile capital, offering generous incentives to attract investment. Existing economics research has suggested that these tax incentives have a limited ability to affect investment patterns and are often excessively costly when measured against the amount of investment and jobs created. In this paper, we argue instead that the "competition" for capital can be politically beneficial to incumbent politicians. Building off work on electoral pandering, we argue that incentives allow politicians to take credit for firms' investment decisions. We test the empirical implications of this theory using a nationwide Internet survey, which employs a randomized experiment to test how voters evaluate the performance of incumbent US governors. Our findings illustrate a critical political benefit of offering such incentives. Politicians can use these incentives to take credit for investment flowing into their districts and to minimize the political fallout when investors choose to locate elsewhere.
The Direct and Indirect Effects of Small Business Administration Lending on Growth: Evidence from U.S. County-Level Data
Andrew Young et al.
NBER Working Paper, October 2014
Conventional wisdom suggests that small businesses are innovative engines of Schumpetarian growth. However, as small businesses, they are likely to face credit rationing in financial markets. If true then policies that promote lending to small businesses may yield substantial economy-wide returns. We examine the relationship between Small Business Administration (SBA) lending and local economic growth using a spatial econometric framework across a sample of 3,035 U.S. counties for the years 1980 to 2009. We find evidence that a county's SBA lending per capita is associated with direct negative effects on its income growth. We also find evidence of indirect negative effects on the growth rates of neighboring counties. Overall, a 10% increase in SBA loans per capita is associated with a cumulative decrease in income growth rates of about 2%.
State Income Taxes and Interstate Migration
Roger Cohen, Andrew Lai & Charles Steindel
Business Economics, July 2014, Pages 176-190
This paper examines the comprehensive IRS data set of state-state migration flows for evidence that differences in state income tax rates are associated with migration patterns. Using annual data on moves between every pair of states, pooled time-series cross-section regressions indicate that in the 1992-2010 period states with higher top marginal income tax rates experienced relatively greater outmigration of taxpayers and gross income. To illustrate the magnitude of the tax effect, we estimate that by 2010 cumulative losses since the enactment of New Jersey's 2004 "millionaires' tax" were as much as 42,000 taxpayers and $6.9 billion in annual adjusted gross income. These results suggest that sustained, relatively high income tax rates could gradually erode a state's population and revenue base.
The Heterogeneous Effects of Government Spending: It's All About Taxes
Axelle Ferriere & Gaston Navarro
NYU Working Paper, August 2014
Empirical work suggests that government spending does not crowd-out consumption. Most representative-agent models predict the opposite. In an environment with heterogeneous households and uninsurable idiosyncratic risk, progressivity of taxes is a key determinant of the effects of government spending. We show that a rise in government spending can be expansionary, both for output and consumption, if financed with more progressive labor taxes. We use large changes in military spending to provide evidence that US government spending has been expansionary only in periods of increasing progressivity. In this respect, the distributional impact of fiscal policy is central to its aggregate effects.
Fiscal Multipliers in Recessions and Expansions: Does it Matter Whether Government Spending is Increasing or Decreasing?
Daniel Riera-Crichton, Carlos Vegh & Guillermo Vuletin
World Bank Working Paper, July 2014
Using non-linear methods, this paper finds that existing estimates of government spending multipliers in expansion and recession may yield biased results by ignoring whether government spending is increasing or decreasing. For industrial countries, the problem originates in the fact that, contrary to one's priors, it is not always the case that government spending is going up in recessions (i.e., acting countercyclically). In almost as many cases, government spending is actually going down (i.e., acting procyclically). Since the economy does not respond symmetrically to government spending increases or decreases, the "true" long-run multiplier for bad times (and government spending going up) turns out to be 2.3 compared to 1.3 if we just distinguish between recession and expansion. In the case of developing countries, the bias results from the fact that the multiplier for recessions and government spending going down (the "when-it-rains-it-pours" phenomenon) is larger than when government spending is going up.
Tax News: Identifying Tax Expectations from Municipal Bonds with an Application to Household Consumption
Lorenz Kueng
NBER Working Paper, August 2014
Although theoretical models of household behavior often emphasize fiscal foresight, most empirical studies neglect the role of news, thereby potentially underestimating the total effect of tax changes. Using novel high-frequency bond data, I develop a model of the term structure of municipal yield spreads as a function of future top income tax rates and a risk premium. Testing the model using the presidential elections of 1992 and 2000 as two natural experiments shows that financial markets forecast future tax rates remarkably well in both the short and long run. Combining these market-based tax expectations with consumption data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey, I find that consumption of high-income households increases by close to 1% in response to news of a 1% increase in expected after-tax lifetime income, consistent with the basic rational-expectations life-cycle theory.
How the West Was Bought: How a 'Simple' Payment to Compensate Local Governments Became an Uncontrollable Federal Subsidy
Devin Thomas Kenney
Michigan State University Working Paper, September 2014
The federal government owns and administers more than 1/4 of the land in the United States, most of which is located in the Western half of the country and most of which is not subject to local taxation. To counterbalance the negative fiscal impact of nontaxable federal land in the United States, Congress created a Payment in Lieu of Taxes program, known as PILT, to compensate local governments for the government services they provide. The U.S. Department of the Interior distributes PILT as lump-sum payments directly to local governments. In order to prevent overcompensation, PILT payments are limited by the amount that the local government units receive under other federal revenue sharing programs, many of which are based directly on the extraction of natural resources like oil, gas, and timber. PILT has one major problem though: the deduction provision doesn't work. This is because only funds received by the unit of local government are deducted from PILT. Therefore, if the funds are passed through to a smaller governing agency, known as a service district, there is no deduction. The U.S. Department of the Interior should, through notice-and-comment rulemaking, clarify its PILT regulations to discourage states and local governments from subdividing themselves into smaller and smaller entities in order to maximize the amount of federal monies they receive. Many interested parties, including the National Association of Counties, argue that PILT should be expanded to cover all federal lands and to remove the deduction provision, while others hew to the other extreme, arguing that PILT should be eliminated entirely. The first argument completely overlooks the very real abuses perpetrated under PILT today while potentially increasing overcompensation; the second ignores the reality that local communities foot the bill to provide government services on federal land. Administering PILT in a manner that adheres to the spirit of deducting double payments would remove the incentive for inefficient governance and create an incentive to manage, rather than exploit, public lands. The Article offers a tentative proposal for the form such reform could take, as well as explaining why other reforms, such as statutory amendment or stricter enforcement, might be complicated by political expediency.
Economic policy uncertainty, financial markets and probability of US recessions
Lilia Karnizova & Jiaxiong (Chris) Li
Economics Letters, November 2014, Pages 261-265
We use probit recession forecasting models to assess the ability of economic policy uncertainty indexes developed by Baker et al. (2013) to predict future US recessions. The model specifications include policy indexes on their own, and in combination with financial variables, such as interest rate spreads, stock returns and stock market volatility. Both in-sample and out-of-sample analysis suggests that the policy uncertainty indexes are statistically and economically significant in forecasting recessions at the horizons beyond five quarters. The index based on newspaper reports emerges as the best predictor, outperforming the term spread at the longer forecast horizons.
The Perception Of Social Security Incentives For Labor Supply And Retirement: The Median Voter Knows More Than You'd Think
Jeffrey Liebman & Erzo Luttmer
NBER Working Paper, October 2014
The degree to which the Social Security tax distorts labor supply depends on the extent to which individuals perceive the link between current earnings and future Social Security benefits. Some Social Security reform plans have been motivated by an assumption that workers fail to perceive this link and that increasing the salience of the link could result in significant efficiency gains. To measure the perceived linkage between labor supply and Social Security benefits, we administered a survey to a representative sample of Americans aged 50-70. We find that the majority of respondents believe that their Social Security benefits increase with labor supply. Indeed, respondents generally report a link between labor supply and future benefits that is somewhat greater than the actual incentive. We also surveyed people about their understanding of various other provisions in the Social Security benefit rules. We find that some of these provisions (e.g., effects of delayed benefit claiming and rules on widow benefits) are relatively well understood while others (e.g., rules on spousal benefits, provisions on which years of earnings are taken into account) are less well understood. In addition, our survey incorporated a framing experiment, which shows that how the incentives for delayed claiming are presented has an impact on hypothetical claiming decisions. In particular, the traditional "break-even" framing used by the Social Security Administration leads to earlier claiming than other presentations do.
The Empirical Content of Pay-for-Performance
Canice Prendergast
Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, forthcoming
Empirical evidence on the effect of pay-for-performance on output has been scarce. We propose that worker responses to marginal pay-for-performance changes can be related to their response to a measure of taxes. Using this approach, we suggest a short-run elasticity of output with respect to incentive pay for high earners in the United States of 0.25 or lower, and it is difficult to rule out very low responsiveness.
Public Pressure and Corporate Tax Behavior
Scott Dyreng, Jeffrey Hoopes & Jaron Wilde
Duke University Working Paper, July 2014
We examine whether public pressure related to compliance with subsidiary disclosure rules influences corporate tax behavior. ActionAid International, a non-profit activist group, levied public pressure on non-compliant U.K. firms in the FTSE 100 to comply with a rule requiring U.K. firms to disclose the location of all of their subsidiaries. We use this natural experiment to examine whether the public pressure led scrutinized firms to decrease tax avoidance and reduce the use of subsidiaries in tax haven countries relative to other firms in the FTSE 100 not affected by the public pressure. The evidence suggests that the public scrutiny sufficiently changed the costs and benefits of tax avoidance such that tax expense increased for scrutinized firms. The results suggest that public pressure from outside activist groups can exert a significant influence on the behavior of large publicly-traded firms. Our findings extend prior research that has had little success documenting an empirical relation between public scrutiny of tax avoidance and firm behavior.
Customer Concentration and Corporate Tax Avoidance
Henry He Huang et al.
University of Kentucky Working Paper, May 2014
We examine the relation between customer concentration, a critically important aspect of a firm's business model, and the level of corporate tax avoidance. A firm with a concentrated corporate customer base needs to hold more cash, faces a higher likelihood of financial distress, has a stronger incentive to manage earnings upwards, and is likely to be more risk tolerant. Since tax planning can increase both cash flow and accounting earnings and risk tolerant firms are more likely to accept the risks inherent in tax avoidance activities, we hypothesize that corporate customer concentration is positively associated with tax avoidance. As predicted, we find that various measures of corporate customer concentration are positively related to tax avoidance as measured by effective tax rate and book-tax difference. We also document that this positive relation is more pronounced when the firm captures a lower market share in its industry, enjoys less revenue diversification, and engages in less real earnings management. By contrast, we contend that a governmental major customer provides stable cash flow to suppliers and thus alleviates their need for tax avoidance. Consistent with this reasoning, we find that firms engage in lower levels of tax avoidance when they have a governmental major customer, and this association is less pronounced under Democratic presidencies. Together, our findings indicate that a firm's business model (i.e., corporate and governmental major customer) has a significant effect on the extent to which it avoids taxes.
Asymmetric responses to income changes: The payroll tax increase versus tax refund in 2013
Anat Bracha & Daniel Cooper
Economics Letters, September 2014, Pages 534-538
We examine low-to-middle income individuals' response to the 2013 payroll tax increase and their 2012 tax refund and find that consumption declines 90 cents per dollar lost to the tax increase, and rises 60 cents per additional tax refund dollar.
If All You Have Is A Hammer: Finding Economic Development Policies That Matter
Laura Reese
American Review of Public Administration, November 2014, Pages 627-655
This research explores the relative effectiveness of a comprehensive set of local economic development incentives and focuses on two questions: What contributions do common development tools make to the economic health of municipalities?; and, Are there other types of local activities, not typically considered as development tools, that might be more effective in contributing to local economic prosperity? It finds that the factors most consistently and positively related to economic health are investments in the downtown, spending on basic local public services, and using no economic development incentives at all. These findings suggest one primary policy recommendation: the wisest course of action for most cities would be to eschew particularized development incentives, especially those that require tax expenditures.
Do parking fees affect retail sales? Evidence from Starbucks
Kent Hymel
Economics of Transportation, forthcoming
Parking meters are a common feature of urban areas, yet their economic impacts are not well understood. Local governments use meters to raise revenue and to ration scarce parking spaces. On-street parking, however, is seldom priced at the market rate. When inefficiently priced, parking meters may negatively affect the businesses and individuals they are intended to serve. This paper uses a quasi-experimental research design and an observational data set to assess metered parking policy. Sharp twice-daily changes in parking meter enforcement provide a comparison of customer traffic to a popular retail area in free and metered parking environments. Regression discontinuity results suggest that when there is an excess supply of parking (i.e., many spaces are vacant), a small 50 cent per-hour parking fee deters commerce. At two separate Starbucks establishments, the meter fee reduced customer traffic by almost 30%. However, when there is excess demand for parking (i.e., all spaces are constantly occupied), there is no evidence that meters help to increase customer traffic. These results suggest that sub-optimal meter pricing can impose substantial costs on nearby businesses.
How can government spending stimulate consumption?
Daniel Murphy
Review of Economic Dynamics, forthcoming
Recent empirical work finds that government spending shocks can cause aggregate consumption to increase. This paper builds on the framework of imperfect information in and to show how government spending can stimulate consumption. Owners of firms targeted by an increase in government spending perceive an increase in their permanent income relative to their future tax liabilities, while owners of firms not targeted remain unaware of the implicit increase in future tax liabilities, causing aggregate consumption to increase. I show that a testable implication of this model - namely that the value of firms should increase in response to government spending shocks, implying all else equal an increase in aggregate stock returns - is consistent with empirical evidence.
Thursday, October 9, 2014
Skin care
Evidence on Self-Stereotyping and the Contribution of Ideas
Katherine Baldiga Coffman
Quarterly Journal of Economics, forthcoming
We use a lab experiment to explore the factors that predict an individual's decision to contribute her idea to a group. We find that contribution decisions depend upon the interaction of gender and the gender stereotype associated with the decision-making domain: conditional on measured ability, individuals are less willing to contribute ideas in areas that are stereotypically outside of their gender's domain. Importantly, these decisions are largely driven by self-assessments, rather than fear of discrimination. Individuals are less confident in gender incongruent areas and are thus less willing to contribute their ideas. Because even very knowledgeable group members under-contribute in gender incongruent categories, group performance suffers and, ex post, groups have difficulty recognizing who their most talented members are. Our results show that even in an environment where other group members show no bias, women in male-typed areas and men in female-typed areas may be less influential. An intervention that provides feedback about a woman's (man's) strength in a male-typed (female-typed) area does not significantly increase the probability that she contributes her ideas to the group. A back-of-the-envelope calculation reveals that a "lean in" style policy that increases contribution by women would significantly improve group performance in male-typed domains.
Ethnic Variation in Gender-STEM Stereotypes and STEM Participation: An Intersectional Approach
Laurie O'Brien et al.
Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology, forthcoming
Stereotypes associating men and masculine traits with science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields are ubiquitous, but the relative strength of these stereotypes varies considerably across cultures. The present research applies an intersectional approach to understanding ethnic variation in gender-STEM stereotypes and STEM participation within an American university context. African American college women participated in STEM majors at higher rates than European American college women (Study 1, Study 2, and Study 4). Furthermore, African American women had weaker implicit gender-STEM stereotypes than European American women (Studies 2–4), and ethnic differences in implicit gender-STEM stereotypes partially mediated ethnic differences in STEM participation (Study 2 and Study 4). Although African American men had weaker implicit gender-STEM stereotypes than European American men (Study 4), ethnic differences between men in STEM participation were generally small (Study 1) or nonsignificant (Study 4). We discuss the implications of an intersectional approach for understanding the relationship between gender and STEM participation.
Not competent enough to know the difference? Gender stereotypes about women's ease of being misled predict negotiator deception
Laura Kray, Jessica Kennedy & Alex Van Zant
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, forthcoming
We examined whether gender differences in the perceived ease of being misled predict the likelihood of being deceived in distributive negotiations. Study 1 (N = 131) confirmed that female negotiators are perceived as more easily misled than male negotiators. This perception corresponded with perceptions of women's relatively low competence. Study 2 (N = 328) manipulated negotiator gender, competence and warmth and found that being perceived as easily misled via low competence affected expectations about the negotiating process, including less deception scrutiny among easily misled negotiators and lower ethical standards among their negotiating counterparts. This pattern held true regardless of buyer and seller gender. Study 3 (N = 298) examined whether patterns of deception in face-to-face negotiations were consistent with this gender stereotype. As expected, negotiators deceived women more so than men, thus leading women into more deals under false pretenses than men.
Is There a "Workable" Race-Neutral Alternative to Affirmative Action in College Admissions?
Mark Long
Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, forthcoming
The 2013 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in the Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin case clarified when and how it is legally permissible for universities to use an applicant's race or ethnicity in its admissions decisions. The court concluded that such use is permissible when "no workable race-neutral alternatives would produce the educational benefits of diversity." This paper shows that replacing traditional affirmative action with a system that uses an applicant's predicted likelihood of being an underrepresented racial minority as a proxy for the applicant's actual minority status can yield an admitted class that has a lower predicted grade point average and likelihood of graduating than the class that would have been admitted using traditional affirmative action. This result suggests that race-neutral alternatives may not be "workable" from the university's perspective.
Measuring the Quality of Politicians Elected by Gender Quotas – Are They Any Different?
Peter Allen, David Cutts & Rosie Campbell
Political Studies, forthcoming
Do gender quotas reduce the quality of politicians elected to a legislature? For the first time in the literature, this article addresses this question by examining the quality of 'quota women' compared to their non-quota colleagues at three stages of their political career: their electoral performance, their qualifications for political office and their post-election legislative career trajectories. Drawing on the unique case of Britain following the 1997 general election, no significant difference is found between the quality of 'quota women' and their non-quota colleagues. Voters do not punish 'quota women' at the ballot box; 'quota women' are as equally qualified for political office as their colleagues; and the gatekeepers of executive office do not discriminate against 'quota women' in front-bench promotions. Considering this, the article concludes by asking whether the similarity of 'quota women' to their colleagues may actually impact on their capacity to affect transformative substantive representation.
Mathematics and Gender: Heterogeneity in Causes and Consequences
Juanna Schrøter Joensen & Helena Skyt Nielsen
Economic Journal, forthcoming
We exploit an institutional reduction in the costs of acquiring advanced high school Mathematics to assess the causes and consequences of fewer girls choosing advanced Mathematics. Girls at the top and boys at the middle of the Mathematics-ability-distribution took more Mathematics because of the cost reduction. We estimate a positive average earnings effect encompassing girls completing more advanced and more Mathematics intensive college degrees, choosing more competitive careers, and climbing higher up the corporate hierarchy. Encouraging more students to opt for advanced Mathematics has a sizeable positive earnings effect for girls, but no effect for boys at the margin.
Don't hate me because I'm beautiful: Acknowledging appearance mitigates the "beauty is beastly" effect
Stefanie Johnson, Traci Sitzmann & Anh Thuy Nguyen
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, forthcoming
Physically attractive women are discriminated against when applying for masculine sex-typed jobs, a phenomenon known as the beauty is beastly effect. We conducted three studies to establish an intervention for mitigating the beauty is beastly effect and to determine mediators and moderators of the intervention. As expected, physically attractive women were rated higher in employment suitability when they acknowledged that their sex or physical appearance is incongruent with the typical applicant for a masculine sex-typed job. Acknowledgement increased inferences of positive masculine traits, allowing the female applicant to be perceived as more suitable for the job, while reducing perceptions that she possessed countercommunal traits, decreasing the violation of her gender role. Finally, sexist beliefs interacted with the acknowledgment intervention, such that the acknowledgement intervention reduced the negative relationship between hostile sexism and employment suitability and increased the positive relationship between benevolent sexism and employment suitability, relative to the control condition.
Demographic Marginalization, Social Integration, and Adolescents' Educational Success
Aprile Benner & Yijie Wang
Journal of Youth and Adolescence, October 2014, Pages 1611-1627
Links between schools' demographic composition and students' achievement have been a major policy interest for decades. Using a racially/ethnically diverse sample from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (N = 6,302; 54 % females; 53 % White, 21 % African American, 15 % Latino, 8 % Asian American, 2 % other race/ethnicity), we examined the associations between demographic marginalization, students' later social integration (loneliness at school, school attachment), and educational performance and attainment. Adolescents who were socioeconomically marginalized at school [i.e., having <15 % same-socioeconomic status (SES) peers] had lower cumulative grade point averages across high school and lower educational attainment. A similar disadvantage was observed among students who were both socioeconomically and racially/ethnically marginalized at school (i.e., having <15 % same-SES peers and <15 % same-racial/ethnic peers). Indirect effects were also observed, such that demographic marginalization was linked to poorer school attachment, and poorer school attachment, in turn, was related to poorer academic performance. These results highlight the educational barriers associated with demographic marginalization and suggest potential targets for future intervention efforts.
Do Competitive Workplaces Deter Female Workers? A Large-Scale Natural Field Experiment on Job-Entry Decisions
Jeffrey Flory, Andreas Leibbrandt & John List
Review of Economic Studies, forthcoming
An important line of research using laboratory experiments has provided a new potential reason for gender imbalances in labor markets: men are more competitively inclined than women. Whether, and to what extent, gender differences in attitudes toward competition lead to differences in naturally-occurring labor markets remains an open question. To examine this, we run a natural field experiment on job-entry decisions where we randomize almost 9,000 job-seekers into different compensation regimes. By varying the role that individual competition plays in setting the wage and the gender composition, we examine whether a competitive compensation regime, by itself, can cause differential job entry. The data highlight the power of the compensation regime in that women disproportionately shy away from competitive work settings. Yet, there are important factors that attenuate the gender differences, including whether the job is performed in teams, whether the position has overt gender associations, and the age of the job-seekers. We also find that the effect is most pronounced in labor markets with attractive alternative employment options. Furthermore, our results suggest that preferences over uncertainty can be just as important as preferences over competition per se in driving job-entry choices.
Movin' on up (to College): First-Generation College Students' Experiences With Family Achievement Guilt
Rebecca Covarrubias & Stephanie Fryberg
Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology, forthcoming
As the first in their families to attend college, first-generation college students (FGCs) experience a discrepancy between the opportunities available to them and those available to their non-college-educated family members that elicits family achievement guilt. The present studies examined family achievement guilt among an ethnically diverse sample of FGCs and continuing-generation college students (CGCs), those whose parents attended college (Studies 1 and 2), and tested a strategy to alleviate such guilt (Study 2). In Study 1, on open-ended and closed-ended measures, FGCs (N = 53) reported more guilt than CGCs (N = 68), and Latinos (N = 60) reported more guilt than Whites (N = 61). Latino FGCs reported more family achievement guilt than the other 3 groups. In Study 2, we examined whether reflecting on a time when one helped family would alleviate family achievement guilt for FGCs. Specifically, FGCs (N = 58) and CGCs (N = 125) described a time they helped their family with a problem (help condition) or did not describe an example (control), then completed the guilt measure. Analyses revealed that (a) consistent with Study 1, FGCs reported higher guilt than CGCs and minorities reported more guilt than Whites, and (b) FGCs in the help condition reported significantly less guilt than FGCs in the control condition and reported no differences in guilt from CGCs across conditions. Finally, perceptions of family struggle mediated this relationship such that reflecting on helping one's family led to perceiving less family struggle, which led to less family achievement guilt for FGCs.
Seeing What They Want to See: Racism and Leadership Development in Urban Schools
Christopher Knaus
Urban Review, September 2014, Pages 420-444
This critical race theory (CRT)-framed qualitative study (n = 9) examined racism within a context of urban teacher leadership development. A series of semi-structured interviews were conducted with three White principals, who each identified one White and one African American teacher as "most promising" leadership potential. These teachers were interviewed, leading to analysis of principal support and teacher perceptions of being supported. The findings clarify principals who adopted a language of equity, while simultaneously arguing that their White teachers were more effective (based erroneously on the belief that the White teachers' students had higher test scores). The African American teachers, on the other hand, were framed as experts in culturally responsive approaches, given increased teaching responsibilities, and not provided similar leadership opportunities. This difference in opportunities and expectations had lasting impacts on the African American teachers, who internalized the lack of resources and negative messages they received from their principals. The paper concludes with CRT implications for inclusive leadership development processes.
Small-business viability in America's urban minority communities
Timothy Bates & Alicia Robb
Urban Studies, October 2014, Pages 2844-2862
Although minority and immigrant entrepreneurs in the US have chosen to concentrate in low-profit retail and service lines of business clustered geographically in urban minority neighbourhoods, their reasons for doing so are unclear. We investigate their motivations by analysing viability among urban small businesses; specifically, we compare the longevity of firms targeting clients in minority neighbourhoods to those serving clients in nonminority-white residential areas. Our broader concerns are to understand why the entrepreneurial occupational choice has been embraced. A key objective is to identify specific barriers that may retard small-firm creation and development in minority-neighbourhood environs. While some claim this market offers attractive opportunities, others stress that predominance of minority- and immigrant-owned firms in this sector reflects the fact that only the least desirable market niches are accessible to them. We find that serving local clienteles in minority neighbourhoods is strongly related to firm closure and low profitability.
The High School Environment and the Gender Gap in Science and Engineering
Joscha Legewie & Thomas DiPrete
Sociology of Education, October 2014, Pages 259-280
Despite the striking reversal of the gender gap in education, women pursue science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) degrees at much lower rates than those of their male peers. This study extends existing explanations for these gender differences and examines the role of the high school context for plans to major in STEM fields. Building on recent gender theories, we argue that widely shared and hegemonic gender beliefs manifest differently across schools so that the gender-specific formation of study plans is shaped by the local environment of high schools. Using the National Education Longitudinal Study, we first show large variations between high schools in the ability to attract students to STEM fields conditional on a large set of pre–high school measures. Schools that are successful in attracting students to these fields reduce the gender gap by 25 percent or more. As a first step toward understanding what matters about schools, we then estimate the effect of two concrete high school characteristics on plans to major in STEM fields in college — a high school's curriculum in STEM and gender segregation of extracurricular activities. These factors have a substantial effect on the gender gap in plans to major in STEM: a finding that is reaffirmed in a number of sensitivity analyses. Our focus on the high school context opens concrete avenues for policy intervention and is of central theoretical importance to understand the gender gap in orientations toward STEM fields.
They won't listen to me: Anticipated power and women's disinterest in male-dominated domains
Jacqueline Chen & Wesley Moons
Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, forthcoming
We hypothesized that women avoid male-dominated domains because they anticipate lacking the power to influence others in those contexts. In Study 1, a questionnaire study, male undergraduates were more interested in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) majors than were female undergraduates, and this gender disparity was mediated by women anticipating having less power in STEM fields than men did. Study 2 experimentally demonstrated that a lack of female representation within an academic context (MBA program) led women to infer that they would lack power in that context. Consequently, they became less interested in the program and in business schools in general. Our findings indicate that expecting low interpersonal power is an important mechanism by which women lose interest in pursuing male-dominated fields.
Do Expectations Make the Difference? A Look at the Effect of Educational Expectations and Academic Performance on Enrollment in Post-Secondary Education
Littisha Bates & Paul Anderson
Race and Social Problems, September 2014, Pages 249-261
Despite the belief that education is the great equalizer in American society, previous research has shown that the promises of educational accomplishments have not extended equally across racial/ethnic groups as minorities are less likely to matriculate to post-secondary education. Using data from the second follow-up and base year of the Educational Longitudinal Study of 2002, we examine the impact of GPA and students' expectations on the probability of post-secondary enrollment. Specifically, we assess the impact of low achievement on the probability of post-secondary enrollment across racial/ethnic groups. We find that low achievement acts as less of a barrier to post-secondary enrollment for minority students compared with their non-Hispanic white counterparts. Moreover, students with high expectations and low achievement experienced higher probabilities of post-secondary enrollment than students with low expectations and high achievement. Given that minority students are said to have higher expectations, we examine whether the interaction of expectations and achievement varies across racial/ethnic groups. While we did not uncover racial/ethnic differences for low-achieving students with high expectations, our findings suggest that expectations help propel all low-achieving students with high expectations into post-secondary enrollment. This study moves beyond the traditional black/white differences by including a number of racial/ethnic groups.
The Role of Gender in Promotion and Pay over a Career
John Addison, Orgul Demet Ozturk & Si Wang
Journal of Human Capital, Fall 2014, Pages 280-317
Using data from the NLSY79, this paper considers the role of gender in promotion and promotion-related earnings development over the course of a career. The raw data suggest reasonably favorable promotion outcomes for females over a career, but any such advantages are found to be confined to less educated females. Further, the strong returns to education in later career stemming from promotion-related earnings growth accrue solely to males. While consistent with fertility timing and choice on the part of educated females, this earnings result is not inconsistent with discrimination as well, reminiscent of findings from an earlier human capital literature.
Corruption as an obstacle to women's political representation: Evidence from local councils in 18 European countries
Aksel Sundström & Lena Wängnerud
Party Politics, forthcoming
This article presents evidence from 18 European countries showing that where levels of corruption are high, the proportion of women elected is low. We hypothesize that corruption indicates the presence of 'shadowy arrangements' that benefit the already privileged and pose a direct obstacle to women when male-dominated networks influence political parties' candidate selection. There is also an indirect signal effect derived from citizen's experiences with a broad range of government authorities. The article uses data that are more fine-grained than usual in this literature. We conduct an empirical test on a new dataset on locally elected councilors in 167 regions in Europe. Using a novel measure of regional quality of government and corruption we perform a multi-level analysis with several regional- and national-level controls. This study provides a unique picture of the proportion of women in locally elected assemblies throughout Europe and a new way of understanding the variations found.
Gender Effects on Student Attitude Toward Science
Thomas Smith, Spencer Pasero & Cornelius McKenna
Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society, February/April 2014, Pages 7-12
The present study examined gender and attitude toward science in fourth- and eighth-grade students in the United States and also assessed to what extent the relationship between science attitude and science achievement differed by gender. Results showed that both fourth- and eighth-grade boys demonstrated more confidence in science than girls, while eighth-grade boys also showed greater liking for science than girls. Additionally, gender moderated the relationship between science achievement and (a) liking science (for fourth-grade students) and (b) confidence in science (eighth-grade students). Results are discussed in terms of addressing gender inequities in science education and career opportunities.
In the eye of the examinee: Likable examiners interfere with performance
Isabella Vormittag & Tuulia Ortner
Social Psychology of Education, September 2014, Pages 401-417
We investigated effects of examiners' ascribed likability and examiners' gender on test performance during a standardized face-to-face testing situation assessing self-estimated and de facto verbal knowledge. One hundred fourteen nonpsychology students were individually tested by one of 22 examiners. A moderated regression analysis revealed a significant three-way interaction of test taker's gender, examiner's gender, and examiner's likability on de facto knowledge: Men and women showed lower scores on de facto knowledge with a same-gender examiner rated as likable compared to their performance with a likable opposite-gender examiner or in interaction with a nonlikable examiner.
A threatening exchange: Gender and life history strategy predict perceptions and reasoning about sexual harassment
Haley Dillon, Lora Adair & Gary Brase
Personality and Individual Differences, January 2015, Pages 195–199
Sexual harassment is a serious societal issue, with extensive economic and psychological consequences, yet it is also an ill-defined construct fundamentally defined in terms of subjective perception. The current work was designed to examine the ways in which individual differences between people are systematically related to different perceptions of sexual harassment scenarios, as well as reasoning about those harassment situations. Participants (N = 460) read several possible harassment scenarios and rated how uncomfortable they would find them. They then also evaluated a quid pro quo sexual harassment situation in terms of their interpretation of it as a threat or a social exchange and completed a deductive reasoning task about the same situation. Females and individuals with slow life history strategies were more uncomfortable with potential harassment situations and were more likely to interpret the quid pro quo scenario as a threat. Further, interpreting the scenario as a threat was associated with poorer performance on the deductive logic task, compared to those who interpreted the scenario as a social exchange.
Wednesday, October 8, 2014
The people's court
Judges and Friends: The Influence of Amici Curiae on U.S. Court of Appeals Judges
Paul Collins & Wendy Martinek
American Politics Research, forthcoming
We contribute to the literature on political psychology, interest groups, and judicial decision making by examining whether ideology mediates the effect of amicus curiae briefs on decision making in the U.S. courts of appeals. Using an original data set, we find evidence that moderate and conservative judges are influenced by amicus briefs, but that liberal judges do not respond to these persuasion attempts. We conclude that this form of interest group lobbying influences judicial decision making by at least some judges and that understanding the efficacy of this interest group strategy requires an appreciation of how political actors process persuasive information.
Do Policy Messengers Matter? Majority Opinion Writers as Policy Cues in Public Agreement with Supreme Court Decisions
Scott Boddery & Jeff Yates
Political Research Quarterly, forthcoming
Does the identity of a majority opinion writer affect the level of agreement a Supreme Court decision receives from the public? Using a survey experiment, we manipulate majority opinion authors to investigate whether individuals are willing to agree with Supreme Court opinions authored by ideologically similar justices even though the decisions cut against their self-identified ideological policy preferences. Our study provides insight into the extent to which policy cues - represented by a political institution's policy messenger - affect agreement with a given policy. We find that a messenger effect indeed augments the level of agreement a given Supreme Court case receives.
Public Opinion and Judicial Behavior in Direct Democracy Systems: Gay Rights in the American States
Daniel Lewis, Frederick Wood & Matthew Jacobsmeier
State Politics & Policy Quarterly, forthcoming
Although the U.S. judiciary is designed to be an independent and counter-majoritarian arbiter of the law, many states feature electoral institutions that may expose judges to public pressure. Scholars have demonstrated that judicial elections provide a clear link between public opinion and judicial decision making that may undermine the ability of courts to act in counter-majoritarian ways to protect minority rights. We extend this line of inquiry by examining whether direct democracy institutions have a similar effect of enhancing the impact of public opinion on judicial behavior and reducing the likelihood of judges voting in favor of minority rights. Empirical results from an analysis of gay rights cases in the American states from 1981 to 2004 provide evidence that direct democracy, in conjunction with electoral retention methods, significantly increases the effect of public opinion on judicial decisions.
Citizenship and Punishment: The Salience of National Membership in U.S. Criminal Courts
Michael Light, Michael Massoglia & Ryan King
American Sociological Review, October 2014, Pages 825-847
When compared to research on the association between immigration and crime, far less attention has been given to the relationship between immigration, citizenship, and criminal punishment. As such, several fundamental questions about how noncitizens are sanctioned and whether citizenship is a marker of stratification in U.S. courts remain unanswered. Are citizens treated differently than noncitizens - both legal and undocumented - in U.S. federal criminal courts? Is the well-documented Hispanic-white sentencing disparity confounded by citizenship status? Has the association between citizenship and sentencing remained stable over time? And are punishment disparities contingent on the demographic context of the court? Analysis of several years of data from U.S. federal courts indicates that citizenship status is a salient predictor of sentencing outcomes-more powerful than race or ethnicity. Other notable findings include the following: accounting for citizenship substantially attenuates disparities between whites and Hispanics; the citizenship effect on sentencing has grown stronger over time; and the effect is most pronounced in districts with growing noncitizen populations. These findings suggest that as international migration increases, citizenship may be an emerging and powerful axis of sociolegal inequality.
Disproportional Imprisonment of Black and Hispanic Males: Sentencing Discretion, Processing Outcomes, and Policy Structures
Jeffery Ulmer, Noah Painter-Davis & Leigh Tinik
Justice Quarterly, forthcoming
Disproportional incarceration of black and Hispanic men has been the subject of much critical commentary and empirical inquiry. Such disproportionality may be due to greater involvement of minority men in serious crime, to discretionary decisions by local justice officials, or to the differential impact of sentencing policies, such as mandatory minimums or sentencing guidelines, that differentially impact minority men. This study investigated the extent to which the disproportional punishment of black and Hispanic men, and local variation in such disproportionality, can be attributed to unexplained disparities in local sentencing decisions, as opposed to the extent to which such differences are mediated by sentencing policies, or case-processing and extralegal factors. We use 2005-2009 federal court and Pennsylvania state court data. Our findings suggest, particularly in Federal courts, that most disproportionality is determined by processes prior to sentencing, especially sentencing policies that differentially impact minority males.
The Sentencing Consequences of Federal Pretrial Supervision
James Oleson et al.
Crime & Delinquency, forthcoming
Legal variables, such as offense severity and criminal history, principally shape sentencing decisions, but extralegal factors such as race, gender, and age also influence sentencing outcomes. Studies focusing on the effect of pretrial detention on sentencing outcomes usually associate pretrial detention with negative sentencing outcomes. The current study followed 90,037 federal defendants from indictment through sentencing, and measured the effects of pretrial detention on sentencing decisions. Detention (and, to a lesser degree, revocation of pretrial release) was associated with increased likelihood of receiving a prison sentence and greater sentence length, even when controlling for offense severity and criminal history scores.
Judicial error by groups and individuals
Frans van Dijk, Joep Sonnemans & Eddy Bauw
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, forthcoming
In criminal cases judges evaluate and combine probabilistic evidence to reach verdicts. Unavoidably, errors are made, resulting in unwarranted conviction or acquittal of defendants. This paper addresses the questions (1) whether hearing cases by teams of three persons leads to less error than hearing cases alone; (2) whether deliberation leads to better decisions than mechanical aggregation of individual opinions; and (3) whether participating in deliberations improves future individual decisions. We find that having more than one judge consider cases reduces error effectively. This does not mean that it is necessary to deliberate about all cases. In simple cases many errors can be avoided by mechanical aggregation of independent opinions, and deliberation has no added value. In difficult cases discussion leads to less error. The advantage of deliberation goes beyond the case at hand: although we provide no feedback about the quality of verdicts, it improves individual decisions in subsequent cases.
Estimating Gender Disparities in Federal Criminal Cases
Sonja Starr
American Law and Economics Review, forthcoming
This paper assesses and decomposes gender disparities in federal criminal cases. It finds large unexplained gaps favoring women throughout the sentence length distribution, conditional on arrest offense, criminal history, and other pre-charge observables. Decompositions show that most of the unexplained disparity appears to emerge during charging, plea-bargaining, and sentencing fact-finding. The approach provides an important complement to prior disparity studies, which have focused on sentencing and have not incorporated disparities arising from those earlier stages. I also consider various plausible causal theories that could explain the estimated gender gap, using the rich dataset to test their implications.
Examining the prevalence and correlates of a 'senior citizen discount' in US federal courts
Weston Morrow, Samuel Vickovic & Henry Fradella
Criminal Justice Studies, forthcoming
Few studies focus on age as a factor influencing judicial decision-making, in spite of the widespread use of age as a control variable. Although the limited research to have done so is inconsistent, most scholars agree that age may be race- and/or gender-graded in a manner that produces more severe sentences for certain race-gender-age combinations, especially for young males who are Black or Latino. Less consensus exists with regard to whether older defendants are granted more leniency in the sentencing process and, if so, if the effects of older age are also race- and/or gender-graded. The present study examines this question by examining data from the United States Sentencing Commission. The data presented reveal three noteworthy findings. First, a 'senior citizen discount' exists insofar as judges afford more leniency in sentencing to older offenders than their younger counterparts. Second, compared to older males, older females were treated with greater leniency by judges. Finally, whereas Latinos 60 and over were treated with greater severity at the stage of incarceration compared to similarly situated Whites, Blacks received shorter sentence lengths on average. These results are analyzed within the framework of the focal concerns perspective.
Cops and robbers (and eyewitnesses): A comparison of lineup administration by robbery detectives in the USA and Canada
Edie Greene & Andrew Evelo
Psychology, Crime & Law, forthcoming
The purpose of this study was to determine how American and Canadian robbery detectives collect identification evidence and whether their practices are consistent with published guidelines. Via a survey, we asked about the use of various lineup practices (e.g., single-blind vs. double-blind administration, sequential vs. simultaneous presentation, and videotaping). Canadian detectives are more likely to use research-based reforms such as double-blind sequential lineups and videotaping. We also assessed how robbery detectives interact with eyewitnesses at four points during a lineup: prior to the lineup, immediately after an identification, and after 12 seconds and 3 minutes have elapsed without an identification. Results showed that at the latter two junctures, officers from both the countries question eyewitnesses in subtle ways that could influence the likelihood of choosing and confidence in the selection. Canadian detectives are less likely than American detectives to do so, however. This finding can be explained by the absence of written guidelines in most US jurisdictions on how officials should interact with eyewitnesses during lineups.
Interviewing to Detect Deception: When to Disclose the Evidence?
Marina Sorochinski et al.
Journal of Police and Criminal Psychology, October 2014, Pages 87-94
Research shows that there are few objective cues to deception. However, it may be possible to create such cues by strategic interviewing techniques. Strategic Use of Evidence (SUE) is one such technique. The basic premise of the SUE technique is that liars and truth tellers employ different counter-interrogation strategies, and that the evidence against the suspect can be used to exploit these differences in strategies. This study examined the effect of the timing of evidence disclosure (early vs. late vs. gradual) on verbal cues to deception. We predicted that late disclosure would be most effective in differentiating between liars and truth-tellers, and that cues to deception in the gradual disclosure condition would progressively disappear due to the suspects' realization that evidence against them exists. That is, we expected that liars in the gradual presentation condition would become more consistent with the evidence over time. A sample of 86 undergraduate students went through a mock-terrorism paradigm (half innocent, half guilty), and were subsequently interviewed using one of three disclosure strategies: early, gradual, and late disclosure. We measured statement-evidence inconsistencies as cues to deception . Results supported our predictions in that cues to deception were most pronounced in the late disclosure condition. Contrary to our expectations, the results suggested that presenting the evidence gradually may put innocent suspects at a higher risk of misclassification as they seem to adopt a strategy that is more similar to guilty suspects.
Deciding Not to Decide: The Politics of Recusals on the U.S. Supreme Court
Robert Hume
Law & Society Review, September 2014, Pages 621-655
When are U.S. Supreme Court justices more likely to recuse themselves from cases? This article proposes a strategic model of recusal behavior, hypothesizing that the justices balance statutory guidelines concerning recusals against other policy and institutional goals. Using data from the Supreme Court Database, I find evidence that recusal behavior is influenced by a combination of statutory, policy, and institutional considerations. Consistent with statutory explanations, which emphasize the elimination of bias or its appearance, justices are more likely to recuse themselves from cases when business interests are before the Court, when they have served for shorter terms, and when they have previously acted as Solicitor General. However, I also find that the justices are less likely to recuse themselves when cases are likely to be close or when the justices' policy goals are likely to be advanced by participating. These findings suggest that while the justices do follow statutory recusal guidelines, they also have other institutional and policy incentives that lead them to participate in cases despite their conflicts of interest.
An Empirical Study of Political Bias in Legal Scholarship
Adam Chilton & Eric Posner
University of Chicago Working Paper, August 2014
Law professors routinely accuse each other of making politically biased arguments in their scholarship. They have also helped produce a large empirical literature on judicial behavior that has found that judicial opinions sometimes reflect the ideological biases of the judges who join them. Yet no one has used statistical methods to test the parallel hypothesis that legal scholarship reflects the political biases of law professors. This paper provides the results of such a test. We find that, at a statistically significant level, law professors at elite law schools who make donations to Democratic political candidates write liberal scholarship, and law professors who make donations to Republican political candidates write conservative scholarship. These findings raise questions about standards of objectivity in legal scholarship.
The Interplay of Ideological Diversity, Dissents, and Discretionary Review in the Judicial Hierarchy: Evidence from Death Penalty Cases
Deborah Beim & Jonathan Kastellec
Journal of Politics, October 2014, Pages 1074-1088
We use an original dataset of death penalty decisions on the Courts of Appeals to evaluate how the institutions of multimember appellate courts, dissent, and discretionary higher-court review interact to increase legal consistency in the federal judicial hierarchy. First, beginning with three-judge panels, we show the existence of ideological diversity on a panel - and the potential for dissent - plays a significant role in judicial decision making. Second, because of the relationship between panel composition and panel outcomes, considering only the incidence of dissents dramatically underestimates the influence of the institution of dissent - judges dissent much less frequently than they would in the absence of this relationship. Third, this rarity of dissent means they are informative: when judges do dissent, they influence en banc review in a manner consistent with the preferences of full circuits. Taken together, these results have important implications for assessing legal consistency in a vast and diverse judicial hierarchy.
State Solicitors General, Appellate Expertise, and State Success Before the U.S. Supreme Court
Ryan Owens & Patrick Wohlfarth
Law & Society Review, September 2014, Pages 657-685
This article examines how institutional design leads state governments to win their cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. We analyze whether states are more likely to prevail on the merits when they create a formal solicitor general office and have an attorney from that office argue their cases before the Court. We employ an analytical matching approach and find that attorneys from state solicitor general offices are significantly more likely to win their cases compared to other kinds of state attorneys. Accordingly, if states prioritize victory before the Court, they should consider creating state solicitor general offices and granting those solicitors general the authority to control their appellate litigation.
Racial, Ethnic, and Immigrant Threat: Is There a New Criminal Threat on State Sentencing?
Ben Feldmeyer et al.
Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, forthcoming
Objectives: The racial threat perspective argues that racial minorities are subjected to greater punishment in places with large or growing minority populations. However, prior research has focused largely on Black populations while devoting limited attention to potential "Latino threat" or "immigrant threat" effects. To address these gaps, this study explores the effects of racial, ethnic, and immigrant threat on sentence disposition (jail, prison, or community corrections) and sentence length.
Methods: Using 2000 through 2006 data from the Florida Department of Corrections Guideline database, we use multilevel modeling techniques to explore the effects of racial, ethnic, and immigrant threat on state criminal sentencing.
Results: The results provide support for racial/ethnic threat theory among Black but not Latino defendants. Black defendants are more likely to be sentenced to prison and are given longer sentences in counties with growing Black populations. In contrast, Latino sentences are not significantly influenced by Latino population growth. Results provide no support for immigrant threat positions.
Conclusions: Overall, our findings offer a complex picture for racial/ethnic and immigrant threat. However, one pattern remains clear. Within Florida courts, Black defendants continue to be the prime targets for effects of racial threat and resulting disadvantages in criminal sentencing.
The Model Minority Myth for Noncitizen Immigration Offenses and Sentencing Outcomes
Jawjeong Wu & Dae-Young Kim
Race and Justice, October 2014, Pages 303-332
Labeled the model minority, Asian Americans have been seen as less discriminated against than other racial/ethnic minorities in the different aspects of American society. Sentencing scholarship also revealed robust evidence that Asian offenders were not treated differently from White offenders in judicial decision making. Some research even found the most favorable sentencing outcomes for Asian offenders. However, it is unclear whether the model minority hypothesis is validated when only the criminal sentencing of noncitizen offenders is at issue. Using the U.S. Sentencing Commission's sentencing data for fiscal years 2006-2007, the present study, with a focus specifically on immigration offenses, seeks to challenge this hypothesis by examining the extent to which an offender's national origin and race/ethnicity affect sentencing outcomes. Findings reveal strong support for our argument that the model minority advantage is offense-specific and that it is not applicable to all types of offenses. Specifically, there is no model minority advantage for non-U.S. citizens' immigration offenses.
The Influence of Mitigation Evidence, Ethnicity, and SES on Death Penalty Decisions by European American and Latino Venire Persons
Russ Espinoza & Cynthia Willis-Esqueda
Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology, forthcoming
The purpose of the research was to determine whether European American and Latino mock jurors would demonstrate bias in death penalty decision making when mitigation evidence and defendant ethnicity and socioeconomic status (SES) were varied. A total of 561 actual venire persons acted as mock jurors and read a trial transcript that varied a defendant's case information (mitigating circumstances: strong/weak, defendant ethnicity: European American/Latino, and defendant SES: low/high). European American jurors recommended the death penalty significantly more often for the low SES Latino defendant when strength of mitigation evidence was weak. In addition, they also assigned this defendant higher culpability ratings and lower ratings on positive personality trait measures compared with all other conditions. Strong mitigation evidence contributed to lower guilt ratings by European American jurors for the high SES European American defendant. Latino jurors did not differ in their death penalty sentencing across defendant mitigation, ethnicity, or SES conditions. Discussion of in-group favoritism and out-group derogation, as well as suggestions for procedures to diminish juror bias in death penalty cases, is provided.
Examining the judicial decision to substitute credibility instructions for expert testimony on confessions
Dayna Gomes, Douglas Stenstrom & Dustin Calvillo
Legal and Criminological Psychology, forthcoming
Purpose: The present study tested the judicial decision to deny false confession expert testimony on the basis that jury instructions are sufficient to aid jurors in their determinations of disputed confession evidence.
Methods: Three groups of mock jurors (N = 150) were presented with a trial summary that included a videotaped re-enactment of an interrogation in which the interrogator used a maximization ploy. One group received expert testimony in the trial summary, another group received credibility instructions, and a control group received neither. All participants received standard reasonable doubt instructions at the end of the trial summary and then answered questions such as their verdict in the case, the defendant's likelihood of guilt, and the voluntariness of the defendant's confession.
Results: The results showed a high rate of conviction that was only reduced when participants received expert testimony. Across all measures, no significant differences were found between the control and credibility instruction groups.
Conclusions: The results suggest that credibility instructions are not comparable to expert testimony in influencing jurors' judgments of disputed confession evidence. These findings do not support the judicial decision to deny expert testimony on the basis that credibility instructions alone are sufficient to aid potential jurors in their evaluations of confession evidence. Avenues for future research on expert testimony and jury instructions in confession cases are discussed.
Stressing the person: Legal and everyday person attributions under stress
Jennifer Kubota et al.
Biological Psychology, December 2014, Pages 117-124
When determining the cause of a person's behavior, perceivers often overweigh dispositional explanations and underweigh situational explanations, an error known as the Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE). The FAE occurs in part because dispositional explanations are relatively automatic, whereas considering the situation requires additional cognitive effort. Stress is known to impair the prefrontal cortex and executive functions important for the attribution process. We investigated if stress increases dispositional attributions in common place and legal situations. Experiencing a physiological stressor increased participants' cortisol, dispositional attributions of common everyday behaviors, and negative evaluations. When determining whether a crime was due to the defendant's disposition or the mitigating situation, self-reported stress correlated with increased dispositional judgments of defendant's behavior. These findings indicate that stress may makes people more likely to commit the FAE and less favorable in their evaluations of others both in daily life and when making socially consequential judicial decisions.
Short-Sighted Confession Decisions: The Role of Uncertain and Delayed Consequences
Yueran Yang, Stephanie Madon & Max Guyll
Law and Human Behavior, forthcoming
Suspects have a propensity to focus on short-term contingencies, giving disproportionate weight to the proximal consequences that are delivered by police during an interrogation, and too little consideration to the distal (and often more severe) consequences that may be levied by the judicial system if they are convicted. In this research, the authors examined whether the perceived uncertainty and temporal distance of distal consequences contribute to this propensity. Using the repetitive question paradigm (Madon et al., 2012), participants (N = 209) were interviewed about 20 prior criminal and unethical behaviors and were required to admit or deny each one. Participants' denials and admissions were paired with both a proximal consequence and a distal consequence, respectively. Results indicated that the distal consequence had less impact on participants' admission decisions when it was uncertain and temporally remote. These results provide evidence that the perceived uncertainty and temporal distance of future punishment are key factors that lead suspects to confess to crimes in exchange for short-term gains.
'We'll Take It from Here': The Effect of Changing Interviewers in Information Gathering Interviews
Dominic Shaw et al.
Applied Cognitive Psychology, forthcoming
A common strategy in interviewing is to repeatedly focus on the same topics, for example by asking to recall an event first in chronological order and then in reverse order. We examined the effect of changing interviewers between the two questions or keeping the same interviewers throughout on cues to deception. Truth tellers may be most encouraged to recall again what they have witnessed when confronted with new interviewers, as these new interviewers have not heard their story before. Liars may be most encouraged to recall again their story when confronted with the same interviewers, realising that these interviewers will check for consistency in their answers. The impact of changing interviewers should lead to more pronounced differences between truth tellers and liars in terms of detail and repetition in the 'Changed Interviewers' condition compared with the 'Same Interviewers' condition. Participants were interviewed by two interviewers about a mock security meeting they attended. In half the interviews, the same two interviewers remained throughout, and in the other half, two new interviewers took over half-way through. As predicted, differences between truth tellers and liars in terms of detail and repetition were most pronounced in the 'Changed Interviewers' condition. Changing interviewers during an interview effectively differentiates liars and truth tellers with respect to detail and repetition. We discuss this finding and its place within investigative interviewing and deception detection literature.
Tuesday, October 7, 2014
Head of household
The Relationship Between Authoritarianism and Life Satisfaction Changes Depending on Stigmatized Status
Mark Brandt, P.J. Henry & Geoffrey Wetherell
Social Psychological and Personality Science, forthcoming
Members of stigmatized social groups are typically more authoritarian than their nonstigmatized or higher status counterparts. We draw on research demonstrating that authoritarianism compensates for the negative effects of stigma to predict that this endorsement will be more psychologically beneficial (and less harmful) for the stigmatized compared to their high-status counterparts. Consistent with this idea, data from the 2008 (N = 2,322) and 2012 (N = 5,916) American National Election Study indicate that for members of stigmatized social groups (low income, low education, and ethnic minority), authoritarian child rearing values have more positive psychological effects than for members of high-status groups. These results were robust to covariates, including demographics, religiosity, political ideology, and cognitive style.
Maternal Education and the Unequal Significance of Family Structure for Children's Early Achievement
Jennifer March Augustine
Social Forces, forthcoming
The diverging destiny of US children is a modern-day phenomenon driven, in part, by the rise in women's education and its connection to patterns in women's union formation. In short, more educated mothers are more likely to be in stably married families, whereas less educated mothers are more likely to be in unmarried-parent families, because of either a nonmarital birth or a union dissolution, or remarried ones. This connection between education and family structure means that children of less educated mothers are often raised in homes with fewer resources to promote their well-being than children of more educated mothers. In this study, I argue that these patterns in women's education and family structure have implications for children's diverging destinies that also play out in a more subtle way. Specifically, unmarried or disrupted family structures will result in lower-quality parenting for less educated mothers than for more educated mothers in the same family types, producing greater negative consequences for the achievement trajectories of their children. The results of this study, based on data from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (n = 1308) and a longitudinal moderated path model, provide support for this argument. In fact, I find that family structure had no connection to the parenting of more educated mothers, or to their children's achievement. These findings provide novel insight into the advantages that maternal education confers to children, beyond the various well-documented demographic and economic correlates that are accounted for in the study.
The Happiness of Single Mothers: Evidence from the General Social Survey
John Ifcher & Homa Zarghamee
Journal of Happiness Studies, October 2014, Pages 1219-1238
A vast "single mothers' well-being" literature exists but has not studied single mothers' subjective well-being (SWB). This shortcoming is important since it has been shown that there are potentially large slippages between economic indicators and SWB. Using repeated cross-sectional data from the General Social Survey 1972–2008, we examine single mothers' happiness in the US both in absolute terms and relative to other groups: all respondents who are not single mothers, all female respondents who are not single mothers, single childless women, and married mothers. In levels, we find a significant single-mother happiness deficit compared to other groups. This deficit is explained by being single, with the happiness of single mothers statistically indistinguishable from single women without children. Over time, however, the deficit has shrunk relative to all other groups except married mothers. We discuss possible explanations for our findings, including: changes to social welfare programs, increased labor force participation, compositional shifts in single motherhood, and stigma. Our findings are most consistent with compositional shifts and changes in the stigma associated with being a single mother.
Do childhood experiences of neglect affect delinquency among child welfare involved-youth?
Susan Snyder & Darcey Merritt
Children and Youth Services Review, November 2014, Pages 64–71
Child neglect, which is the most common form of maltreatment in the United States, has been repeatedly linked to an increased risk of delinquency. However, the existing literature lacks studies that simultaneously investigate how distinct types of neglect differentially influence delinquency among child welfare involved-youth. In addition, few studies of the relationship between neglect and delinquency include measures of ADHD, peer deviance or community violence, even though these variables have been strongly associated with delinquency. This study uses data from 784 11 to 17 year old youth who participated in Wave I of the Second National Survey of Child and Adolescent Wellbeing (NSCAW II) to examine whether supervisory neglect, physical neglect and parental substance abuse affect delinquency after controlling for ADHD, peer deviance, exposure to community violence, and out-of-home placements. We conducted a negative binomial regression to account for the low rates of delinquency among NSCAW II participants. We did not find significant main effects for supervisory neglect, physical neglect or parental substance abuse. Our study found that as youth age the count of delinquency acts increases. Black and Hispanic youth had higher counts of delinquency than youth with White, multi-racial, or "other" racial identities. Youth in out-of-home care had nearly double the rate of delinquency. Youth with more deviant peer affiliations and youth who had been exposed to community violence engaged in more delinquent behaviors. Our findings underscore the importance of the environment surrounding the youth, and the peers with whom the youth affiliates.
Are infants differentially sensitive to parenting? Early maternal care, DRD4 genotype and externalizing behavior during adolescence
Jörg Nikitopoulos et al.
Journal of Psychiatric Research, forthcoming
Insensitive and unresponsive caregiving during infancy has been linked to externalizing behavior problems during childhood and adolescence. The 7-repeat (7r) allele of the dopamine D4 receptor (DRD4) gene has meta-analytically been associated with a heightened susceptibility to adverse as well as supportive environments. In the present study, we examined long-term effects of early maternal care, DRD4 genotype and the interaction thereof on externalizing and internalizing psychopathology during adolescence. As part of an ongoing epidemiological cohort study, early maternal care was assessed at child's age 3 months during a nursing and playing situation. In a sample of 296 offspring, externalizing and internalizing symptoms were assessed using a psychiatric interview conducted at age 15 years. Parents additionally filled out a questionnaire on their children's psychopathic behaviors. Results indicated that adolescents with the DRD4 7r allele who experienced less responsive and stimulating early maternal care exhibited more symptoms of ADHD and CD/ODD as well as higher levels of psychopathic behavior. In accordance with the hypothesis of differential susceptibility, 7r allele carriers showed fewer ADHD symptoms and lower levels of psychopathic behavior when exposed to especially beneficial early caregiving. In contrast, individuals without the DRD4 7r allele proved to be insensitive to the effects of early maternal care. This study replicates earlier findings with regard to an interaction between DRD4 genotype and early caregiving on externalizing behavior problems in preschoolers. It is the first one to imply continuity of this effect until adolescence.
Associations Between Family Structure Change and Child Behavior Problems: The Moderating Effect of Family Income
Rebecca Ryan, Amy Claessens & Anna Markowitz
Child Development, forthcoming
This study investigated conditions under which family structure matters most for child well-being. Using data from the Children of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (n = 3,936), a national sample of U.S. families, it was estimated how changes in family structure related to changes in children's behavior between age 3 and 12 separately by household income level to determine whether associations depended on families' resources. Early changes in family structure, particularly from a two-biological-parent to single-parent family, predicted increases in behavior problems more than later changes, and movements into single and stepparent families mattered more for children of higher versus lower income parents. Results suggest that for children of higher income parents, moving into a stepfamily may improve, not undermine, behavior.
Maternal Buffering of Human Amygdala-Prefrontal Circuitry During Childhood but Not During Adolescence
Dylan Gee et al.
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Mature amygdala-prefrontal circuitry regulates affect in adulthood but shows protracted development. In altricial and semialtricial species, caregivers provide potent affect regulation when mature neurocircuitry is absent. The present investigation examined a potential mechanism through which caregivers provide regulatory influences in childhood. Children, but not adolescents, showed evidence of maternal buffering, such that maternal stimuli suppressed amygdala reactivity. In the absence of maternal stimuli, children exhibited immature amygdala-prefrontal connectivity. However, in the presence of maternal stimuli, children's connectivity was more mature, resembling adolescents' connectivity. Children showed improved affect-related regulation in the presence of their mothers. Individual differences emerged, with greater maternal influence on amygdala-prefrontal circuitry associated with stronger mother-child relationships and maternal modulation of behavioral regulation. These findings suggest a neural mechanism through which caregivers modulate children's regulatory behavior by inducing more mature connectivity and buffering against heightened reactivity. Maternal buffering in childhood, but not adolescence, suggests that childhood may be a sensitive period for amygdala-prefrontal development.
Female face preference in 4-month-olds: The importance of hairline
Anne Hillairet de Boisferon et al.
Infant Behavior and Development, November 2014, Pages 676–681
At 3–4 months of age, infants respond to gender information in human faces. Specifically, young infants display a visual preference toward female over male faces. In three experiments, using a visual preference task, we investigated the role of hairline information in this bias. In Experiment 1, we presented male and female composite faces with similar hairstyles to 4-month-olds and observed a preference for female faces. In Experiment 2, the faces were presented, but in this instance, without hairline cues, and the preference was eliminated. In Experiment 3, using the same cropping to eliminate hairline cues, but with feminized female faces and masculinized male faces, infants' preference toward female faces was still not in evidence. The findings show that hairline information is important in young infants' preferential orientation toward female faces.
Neoliberal Mothering and Vaccine Refusal: Imagined Gated Communities and the Privilege of Choice
Jennifer Reich
Gender & Society, October 2014, Pages 679-704
Neoliberal cultural frames of individual choice inform mothers' accounts of why they refuse state-mandated vaccines for their children. Using interviews with 25 mothers who reject recommended vaccines, this article examines the gendered discourse of vaccine refusal. First, I show how mothers, seeing themselves as experts on their children, weigh perceived risks of infection against those of vaccines and dismiss claims that vaccines are necessary. Second, I explicate how mothers see their own intensive mothering practices — particularly around feeding, nutrition, and natural living — as an alternate and superior means of supporting their children's immunity. Third, I show how they attempt to control risk through management of social exposure, as they envision disease risk to lie in "foreign" bodies outside their networks, and, therefore, individually manageable. Finally, I examine how these mothers focus solely on their own children by evaluating — and often rejecting — assertions that their choices undermine community health, while ignoring how their children benefit from the immunity of others. By analyzing the gendered discourse of vaccines, this article identifies how women's insistence on individual maternal choice as evidence of commitment to their children draws on and replicates structural inequality in ways that remain invisible, but affect others.
Child care instability from 6 to 36 months and the social adjustment of children in prekindergarten
Mary Bratsch-Hines et al.
Early Childhood Research Quarterly, forthcoming
Most children in the United States experience nonparental child care during early childhood, and many children experience changes in their care during this period. Changes in care, or child care instability, have been argued to disrupt children's emerging relationships with others and may impede children's social-emotional development, particularly when changes occur during infancy and toddlerhood. Data for this study were drawn from the Family Life Project, a longitudinal study representative of families living in rural low-wealth areas. With a sample of 1292 children who were followed from six months to prekindergarten, this study examined the associations between cumulative child provider instability (measured as overall changes or changes across or within settings) from 6 to 36 months and children's social adjustment at prekindergarten. A number of factors were included to control for family selection into child care. Results suggested that more overall child care provider instability was negatively associated with teacher ratings of social adjustment at prekindergarten. This association was driven by provider instability across but not within settings, though effect sizes were small. These findings point to an increased need to understand how early child care instability may be related to children's subsequent development.
Work Hours, Schedules, and Insufficient Sleep Among Mothers and Their Young Children
Ariel Kalil et al.
Journal of Marriage and Family, October 2014, Pages 891–904
Studies have linked parents' employment, work hours, and work schedules to their own sleep quality and quantity, but it is unclear whether these associations extend to children. The authors used data from the 5-year in-home survey of the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (N = 1,818) to examine the associations between maternal work hours and schedule and insufficient sleep among disadvantaged mothers and their young children. They found that mothers who worked more than 35 hours per week were more likely to experience insufficient sleep compared to mothers who worked fewer hours, whereas children were more likely to experience insufficient sleep when their mothers worked between 20 and 40 hours. Nonstandard work schedules were associated with an increased likelihood of insufficient sleep for mothers but not their children. The results highlight a potentially difficult balance between work and family for many disadvantaged working mothers in the United States.
Can babies learn to read? A randomized trial of baby media
Susan Neuman et al.
Journal of Educational Psychology, August 2014, Pages 815-830
Targeted to children as young as 3 months old, there is a growing number of baby media products that claim to teach babies to read. This randomized controlled trial was designed to examine this claim by investigating the effects of a best-selling baby media product on reading development. One hundred and seventeen infants, ages 9 to 18 months, were randomly assigned to treatment and control groups. Children in the treatment condition received the baby media product, which included DVDs, word and picture flashcards, and word books to be used daily over a 7-month period; children in the control condition, business as usual. Examining a 4-phase developmental model of reading, we examined both precursor skills (such as letter name, letter sound knowledge, print awareness, and decoding) and conventional reading (vocabulary and comprehension) using a series of eye-tracking tasks and standardized measures. Results indicated that babies did not learn to read using baby media, despite some parents displaying great confidence in the program's effectiveness.
Single Parents, Unhappy Parents? Parenthood, Partnership, and the Cultural Normative Context
Olga Stavrova & Detlef Fetchenhauer
Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, forthcoming
Although the question of whether parenthood is generally beneficial for well-being is currently being hotly debated in the social sciences, single parents are nearly unanimously assumed to be worse off than their partnered counterparts. The present research questions this finding by demonstrating that whether single parents are actually less happy than partnered parents depends on a country's cultural norms regarding childbearing practices. Using two large-scale international data sets (the European Values Study [EVS] and the European Social Survey [ESS]) covering altogether 43 countries, we show that only in collectivist countries and countries with a strong two-parent family norm did parenthood negatively affect the life satisfaction and the emotional well-being of single but not partnered (married or cohabiting) individuals. Most notably, the detrimental effect of a country's social norm of a two-parent family existed even among single parents who did not share this norm themselves.
Monday, October 6, 2014
When Going Green Backfires: How Firm Intentions Shape the Evaluation of Socially Beneficial Product Enhancements
George Newman, Margarita Gorlin & Ravi Dhar
Journal of Consumer Research, October 2014, Pages 823-839
Many companies offer products with social benefits that are orthogonal to performance (e.g., green products). The present studies demonstrate that information about a company's intentions in designing the product plays an import role in consumers' evaluations. In particular, consumers are less likely to purchase a green product when they perceive that the company intentionally made the product better for the environment compared to when the same environmental benefit occurred as an unintended side effect. This result is explained by consumers' lay theories about resource allocation: intended (vs. unintended) green enhancements lead consumers to assume that the company diverted resources away from product quality, which in turn drives a reduction in purchase interest. The present studies also identify an important boundary condition based on the type of enhancement and show that the basic intended (vs. unintended) effect generalizes to other types of perceived tradeoffs, such as healthfulness and taste.
The Labor Market Impacts of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Oil Drilling Moratorium
Joseph Aldy
NBER Working Paper, August 2014
In 2010, the Gulf Coast experienced the largest oil spill, the greatest mobilization of spill response resources, and the first Gulf-wide deepwater drilling moratorium in U.S. history. Taking advantage of the unexpected nature of the spill and drilling moratorium, I estimate the net effects of these events on Gulf Coast employment and wages. Despite predictions of major job losses in Louisiana — resulting from the spill and the drilling moratorium — I find that Louisiana coastal parishes, and oil-intensive parishes in particular, experienced a net increase in employment and wages. In contrast, Gulf Coast Florida counties, especially those south of the Panhandle, experienced a decline in employment. Analysis of accommodation industry employment and wage, business establishment count, sales tax, and commercial air arrival data likewise show positive economic activity impacts in the oil-intensive coastal parishes of Louisiana and reduced economic activity along the Non-Panhandle Florida Gulf Coast.
BYOB: How Bringing Your Own Shopping Bags Leads to Treating Yourself, and the Environment
Uma Karmarkar & Bryan Bollinger
Harvard Working Paper, January 2014
As concerns about climate change and resource availability become more central in public discourse, using reusable grocery bags has been strongly promoted as an environmentally and socially conscious virtue. In parallel, firms have joined policy makers in using a variety of initiatives to reduce the use of plastic bags. However, little is known about how adopting reusable bags might alter consumers' in-store behavior. Using scanner panel data from a single California location of a major grocery chain, and completely controlling for consumer heterogeneity, we demonstrate that bringing your own bags simultaneously increases your purchases of environmentally conscious and indulgent (hedonic) items. Supporting these effects, we use experimental methods to demonstrate that participants who imagined shopping with their own bags are more likely to spontaneously consider purchasing chips or dessert items, and indicate relatively higher willingness to pay for foods in these categories, as well as for organic foods. Furthermore, we show that the impact on organic and indulgent items is dissociable in a manner dependent on the consumers' motivation for bringing bags. These findings have implications for decisions related to product pricing, placement and assortment, store layout, and the choice of strategies to increase the use of reusable bags.
Gasoline Taxes and the Great Depression: A Comparative History
Carl-Henry Geschwind
Journal of Policy History, Fall 2014, Pages 595-624
"These four years, from 1930 to 1933, were a key turning point in the international history of the gasoline tax. At the end of 1929, motor fuel imposts in Germany and New Zealand were essentially equal to that in the highest-taxed state, Florida, at $0.66 to $0.68 per U.S. gallon in 2005 U.S. dollars, while the British rate was only slightly higher at $0.84 per U.S. gallon (within the range of exchange-rate uncertainties). But by the end of 1933, in nominal terms the rate had doubled in Great Britain, more than doubled in New Zealand, and nearly tripled in Germany, while it had increased only 42 percent in Florida and 52 percent on average in the United States as a whole. At the beginning of 1934, the gasoline tax amounted to $1.96 per U.S. gallon in 2005 U.S. dollars in Great Britain, $2.24 in New Zealand, and $2.54 in Germany. Meanwhile, in the United States the combined state and federal tax ranged from $0.45 in the lowest-taxed states to $1.21 in the highest-taxed states, with the average rate being $0.70. In other words, the rates overseas during these four years moved far above the range encountered in the United States, creating a disparity that has persisted ever since."
Automatic Bill Payment and Salience Effects: Evidence from Electricity Consumption
Steven Sexton
Review of Economics and Statistics, forthcoming
The introduction of automatic bill payment (ABP) programs in 2005 eliminated the need for consumers to view recurring bills. If those enrolled in ABP programs offered by utilities and other service providers forego inspection of their recurring bills, then price salience declines, prices perceived by boundedly rational agents fall, and consumption increases. This paper considers the impact of such programs on consumer demand and welfare, and empirically tests whether enrollment in such programs increases demand. Results show ABP enrollment increases residential electricity consumption 4.0% and commercial electricity consumption as much as 8.1%. Enrollment in programs designed to smooth seasonal variation in monthly utility bills of low-income customers results in 6.7% greater electricity use.
Does awareness effect the restorative function and perception of street trees?
Ying-Hsuan Lin et al.
Frontiers in Psychology, August 2014
Urban streetscapes are outdoor areas in which the general public can appreciate green landscapes and engage in outdoor activities along the street. This study tested the extent to which the degree of awareness of urban street trees impacts attention restoration and perceived restorativeness. We manipulated the degree of awareness of street trees. Participants were placed into four groups and shown different images: (a) streetscapes with absolutely no trees; (b) streetscapes with flashes of trees in which participants had minimal awareness of the content; (c) streetscapes with trees; and (d) streetscapes with trees to which participants were told to pay attention. We compared the performance of 138 individuals on measures of attention and their evaluations of perceived restorativeness. Two main findings emerged. First, streetscapes with trees improved the performance of participants on attentional tests even without their awareness of the trees. Second, participants who had raised awareness of street trees performed best on the attentional test and rated the streetscapes as being more restorative. These findings enhance our knowledge about the role of an individual's awareness of restorative elements and have implications for designers and individuals who are at risk of attentional fatigue.
Enhanced Formation of Disinfection Byproducts in Shale Gas Wastewater-Impacted Drinking Water Supplies
Kimberly Parker et al.
Environmental Science & Technology, forthcoming
The disposal and leaks of hydraulic fracturing wastewater (HFW) to the environment pose human health risks. Since HFW is typically characterized by elevated salinity, concerns have been raised whether the high bromide and iodide in HFW may promote the formation of disinfection byproducts (DBPs) and alter their speciation to more toxic brominated and iodinated analogues. This study evaluated the minimum volume percentage of two Marcellus Shale and one Fayetteville Shale HFWs diluted by fresh water collected from the Ohio and Allegheny Rivers that would generate and/or alter the formation and speciation of DBPs following chlorination, chloramination, and ozonation treatments of the blended solutions. During chlorination, dilutions as low as 0.01% HFW altered the speciation toward formation of brominated and iodinated trihalomethanes (THMs) and brominated haloacetonitriles (HANs), and dilutions as low as 0.03% increased the overall formation of both compound classes. The increase in bromide concentration associated with 0.01–0.03% contribution of Marcellus HFW (a range of 70–200 μg/L for HFW with bromide = 600 mg/L) mimics the increased bromide levels observed in western Pennsylvanian surface waters following the Marcellus Shale gas production boom. Chloramination reduced HAN and regulated THM formation; however, iodinated trihalomethane formation was observed at lower pH. For municipal wastewater-impacted river water, the presence of 0.1% HFW increased the formation of N-nitrosodimethylamine (NDMA) during chloramination, particularly for the high iodide (54 ppm) Fayetteville Shale HFW. Finally, ozonation of 0.01–0.03% HFW-impacted river water resulted in significant increases in bromate formation. The results suggest that total elimination of HFW discharge and/or installation of halide-specific removal techniques in centralized brine treatment facilities may be a better strategy to mitigate impacts on downstream drinking water treatment plants than altering disinfection strategies. The potential formation of multiple DBPs in drinking water utilities in areas of shale gas development requires comprehensive monitoring plans beyond the common regulated DBPs.
Conservation Policies: Who Responds to Price and Who Responds to Prescription?
Casey Wichman, Laura Taylor & Roger von Haefen
NBER Working Paper, September 2014
The efficiency properties of price and non-price instruments for conservation in environmental policy are well understood. Yet, there is little evidence comparing the effectiveness of these instruments, especially when considering water resource management. We exploit a rich panel of residential water consumption to examine heterogeneous responses to both price and non-price conservation policies during times of drought while controlling for unobservable household characteristics. Our empirical models suggest that the burden of pricing policies fall disproportionately on low-income households and fail to reduce consumption among households who generally are large consumers of water. However, prescriptive policies such as restrictions on outdoor water use result in uniform responses across income classes while simultaneously targeting reductions from households with irrigation systems or historically high consumption.
The Persistent Impacts of Norm-Based Messaging and Their Implications for Water Conservation
María Bernedo, Paul Ferraro & Michael Price
Journal of Consumer Policy, September 2014, Pages 437-452
Although an increasing number of studies have demonstrated the short-term impacts of behavioral nudges to achieve public policy objectives, less is known about their longer-term impacts. In a randomized experimental design with over 100,000 households, we study the longer-term impacts of a one-time behavioral nudge that aimed to induce voluntary reductions in water use during a drought. Combining technical information, moral suasion, and social comparisons, the nudge has a surprisingly persistent effect. Although its effect size declines by almost 50% after 1 year, it remains detectable and policy-relevant six years later. In fact, the total reduction in water use achieved after the 4-month period targeted by the intervention is larger than the total reduction achieved during the target period. Further analysis suggests that the intervention works through both short-lived behavioral adjustments and longer-lived adjustments to habits or physical capital. Treatment effects are not detectable in homes from which the treated consumers have moved, which provides suggestive evidence that these longer-lived adjustments are mobile rather than incorporated into the housing stock. The persistence of the effect makes the intervention more cost-effective than previously assumed (cost drops by almost 60%). Nevertheless, water utilities may find this persistence undesirable if the nudges are intended to have only a short-run effect on demand during environmental emergencies.
The Relative Weights of Direct and Indirect Experiences in the Formation of Environmental Risk Beliefs
Kip Viscusi & Richard Zeckhauser
Risk Analysis, forthcoming
Direct experiences, we find, influence environmental risk beliefs more than the indirect experiences derived from outcomes to others. This disparity could have a rational basis. Or it could be based on behavioral proclivities in accord with the well-established availability heuristic or the vested-interest heuristic, which we introduce in this article. Using original data from a large, nationally representative sample, this article examines the perception of, and responses to, morbidity risks from tap water. Direct experiences have a stronger and more consistent effect on different measures of risk belief. Direct experiences also boost the precautionary response of drinking bottled water and drinking filtered water, while indirect experiences do not. These results are consistent with the hypothesized neglect of indirect experiences in other risk contexts, such as climate change.
Dutch Disease or Agglomeration? The Local Economic Effects of Natural Resource Booms in Modern America
Hunt Allcott & Daniel Keniston
NBER Working Paper, September 2014
Does natural resource production benefit producer economies, or does it instead create a "Natural Resource Curse," perhaps as Dutch Disease crowds out the manufacturing sector? We combine a new panel dataset of oil and gas production and reserves with county-level aggregate outcomes and restricted-access Census of Manufactures microdata to estimate how oil and gas booms have affected local economic growth in the U.S. since the 1960s. We find that a boom that doubles national oil and gas employment increases total employment by 2.9 percent in a county with one standard deviation larger oil and gas endowment. Despite substantial migration, wages also rise. Notwithstanding, manufacturing employment and output are actually pro-cyclical with oil and gas booms, because many manufacturers in resource-abundant counties supply inputs to the oil and gas sector, while many others sell locally-traded goods and benefit from increases in local demand. Manufacturers' revenue productivity also grows during booms, especially in linked and local industries, but there is no evidence that output prices rise. The results demonstrate how a meaningful share of manufacturers produce locally traded goods, and they highlight how linkages to natural resources can be a driver of manufacturing growth.
Hazardous Waste Hits Hollywood: Superfund and Housing Prices in Los Angeles
Ralph Mastromonaco
Environmental and Resource Economics, October 2014, Pages 207-230
This paper contributes to the ongoing debate concerning the effect of various actions taken by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency under CERCLA, commonly known as the Superfund Program, on housing prices. This study uses a housing transaction panel dataset encompassing the five major counties of the Los Angeles Combined Statistical Area to estimate the program's influence on the local housing market. Using house and time-varying census tract fixed effects, I am able to avoid many of the endogeneity problems seen in previous research attempting to measure the Superfund treatment effect. An estimate of the effect on housing prices is given for each of the major events that occur under a typical Superfund remediation. After controlling for confounding correlated unobservables, I find a 7.3 % increase in sales price for houses within 3 km of a site that moves through the complete Superfund program. The analysis gives evidence of positive price appreciation for housing markets and serves as a lower bound for measuring remediation benefits.
Does environmental concern change the tragedy of the commons? Factors affecting energy saving behaviors and electricity usage
Adrienne Ohler & Sherrilyn Billger
Ecological Economics, November 2014, Pages 1–12
Electricity consumption produces private goods, such as heat for homes, but fossil fuel consumption impacts the public goods of clean air and water. While self interests can increase usage, social interests, such as global climate change, can impact an individual's attitude toward energy consumption. This paper examines the tragedy of the commons using household data, and compares the impact of self and social interests in predicting electricity consumption. Using both stated and observed behavioral data, the results show that self interests have a greater impact on energy saving behaviors and electricity use. We extend the analysis to control for an individual's environmental concern and perceived behavioral impact, finding similar results, and supporting the notion that the tragedy of the commons occurs regardless of a person's perception or environmental concern. These findings may explain why pro-environmental attitudes do not necessarily lead to pro-environmental behaviors, and it contributes to our understanding of the motivating factors for energy savings and electricity use by examining both stated and observed behaviors. Policies aimed at electricity reduction may have a greater impact if they focus on private interests, such as pricing, rebates, subsidies, and taxes, rather than social interests alone.
A Direct Estimate of the Technique Effect: Changes in the Pollution Intensity of US Manufacturing 1990–2008
Arik Levinson
NBER Working Paper, August 2014
From 1990 to 2008, the real value of US manufacturing output grew by one-third while the pollution emitted from US factories fell by two-thirds. What accounts for this cleanup? Prior studies have documented that a relatively small share can be explained by changes in the composition of US manufacturing – a shift towards producing relatively more goods whose production processes involve less pollution. Those studies attribute the unexplained majority to "technique", a mix of input substitution, process changes, and end-of-pipe controls. But because that technique effect is a residual left over after other explanations, any errors or interactions in the original calculation could inflate the estimated technique. In this paper I provide the first direct estimate of the technique effect. I combine the National Emissions Inventories with the NBER-CES Manufacturing Industry Database for each of over 400 manufacturing industries. I aggregate across industries using analogs to the Laspeyres and Paasche price indexes for each of six major air pollutants. The calculations using this direct estimation of the technique effect support the research findings using indirect measures. From 1990 to 2008, production technique changes account for more than 90 percent of the overall cleanup of US manufacturing.
An analysis of U.S. federal mileage ratings for plug-in hybrid electric vehicles
Peter Friedman & Phil Grossweiler
Energy Policy, forthcoming
With the introduction of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, the US Environmental Protection Agency developed a rule to calculate "miles per gallon equivalent" (MPGe) for electric vehicle window stickers and the US Department of Energy created a separate procedure for calculation of fuel economy for use in the federally mandated corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) standards. The EPA rule fails to account for inefficiencies in or emissions resulting from the production of electricity and as a result greatly overestimates the life cycle efficiency of covered vehicles, which would be evident using "exergy analysis." The DOE rule accounts for conversion efficiencies, but includes a long-standing, policy based factor (originally developed to reduce oil consumption by promoting alternatively fueled vehicles). This factor disproportionately raises the calculated performance of electrically powered vehicles. As a result, both the EPA and DOE rules incentivize policies that are not substantiated by the immediate technical merits.
Impact of Oil Boom and Bust on Human Capital Investment in the U.S.
Anil Kumar
Federal Reserve Working Paper, May 2014
This paper uses Census IPUMS data from 1970 to 2010 to estimate the impact of the oil boom and bust on wages and human capital formation in the US. The paper finds that the oil boom between 1970 and 1980 was associated with a slower growth in the relative demand for skills in the oil and gas sector and regions where the sector had a large presence. Overall, the oil boom led to a sharp rise in real wages in oil areas relative to non-oil parts of the nation, raising the opportunity cost of additional schooling. Real wage premium for a college degree declined during the oil boom in oil-rich regions such as Texas, compared with non-oil areas. The oil boom of the 1970's potentially had an impact on human capital investment through two channels — by raising the opportunity cost of additional schooling as well as by lowering the returns from going to college. Using a synthetic cohort approach the paper finds that relative to cohorts who went to high school in the pre-boom period, the cohort reaching high school age during the oil boom was about 2 percentage points less likely to have a college degree by the time they turned 34 to 37 years of age in 2000.
Energy Efficiency and Rebound Effects: An Econometric Analysis of Energy Demand in the Commercial Building Sector
Yueming Qiu
Environmental and Resource Economics, October 2014, Pages 295-335
It is widely recognized that the adoption of energy saving innovations can induce an increase in the usage of the corresponding technologies and thus can possibly increase energy consumption. Among other concerns is that uncertainties regarding the magnitude of this "rebound effect" can deter policy makers from promoting energy efficiency. This paper analyzes the rebound effects of the adoption of energy efficient technologies in commercial buildings. Based upon a structural model of technology adoption and subsequent energy demand at the building level, the empirical results are that energy efficiency can reduce electricity use by about 35 % and natural gas consumption by about 50 %.
Seasonality in Birth Defects, Agricultural Production and Urban Location
Terra McKinnish, Daniel Rees & Peter Langlois
Economics & Human Biology, December 2014, Pages 120–128
This paper tests whether the strength of the "spring spike" in birth defects is related to agricultural production and urban location using Texas Birth Defects Registry data for the period 1996-2007. We find evidence of a spike in birth defects among children conceived in the spring and summer, but it is more pronounced in urban non-agricultural counties than in other types of counties. Furthermore, the spike lasts longer in urban non-agricultural counties as compared to other types of counties.
Sunday, October 5, 2014
How thoughtful
You Didn't Have to Do That: Belief in Free Will Promotes Gratitude
Michael MacKenzie, Kathleen Vohs & Roy Baumeister
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Four studies tested the hypothesis that a weaker belief in free will would be related to feeling less gratitude. In Studies 1a and 1b, a trait measure of free will belief was positively correlated with a measure of dispositional gratitude. In Study 2, participants whose free will belief was weakened (vs. unchanged or bolstered) reported feeling less grateful for events in their past. Study 3 used a laboratory induction of gratitude. Participants with an experimentally reduced (vs. increased) belief in free will reported feeling less grateful for the favor. In Study 4, a reduced (vs. increased) belief in free will led to less gratitude in a hypothetical favor scenario. This effect was serially mediated by perceiving the benefactor as having less free will and therefore as being less sincerely motivated. These findings suggest that belief in free will is an important part of being able to feel gratitude.
Addressing the empathy deficit: Beliefs about the malleability of empathy predict effortful responses when empathy is challenging
Karina Schumann, Jamil Zaki & Carol Dweck
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, September 2014, Pages 475-493
Empathy is often thought to occur automatically. Yet, empathy frequently breaks down when it is difficult or distressing to relate to people in need, suggesting that empathy is often not felt reflexively. Indeed, the United States as a whole is said to be displaying an empathy deficit. When and why does empathy break down, and what predicts whether people will exert effort to experience empathy in challenging contexts? Across 7 studies, we found that people who held a malleable mindset about empathy (believing empathy can be developed) expended greater empathic effort in challenging contexts than did people who held a fixed theory (believing empathy cannot be developed). Specifically, a malleable theory of empathy - whether measured or experimentally induced - promoted (a) more self-reported effort to feel empathy when it is challenging (Study 1); (b) more empathically effortful responses to a person with conflicting views on personally important sociopolitical issues (Studies 2-4); (c) more time spent listening to the emotional personal story of a racial outgroup member (Study 5); and (d) greater willingness to help cancer patients in effortful, face-to-face ways (Study 6). Study 7 revealed a possible reason for this greater empathic effort in challenging contexts: a stronger interest in improving one's empathy. Together, these data suggest that people's mindsets powerfully affect whether they exert effort to empathize when it is needed most, and these data may represent a point of leverage in increasing empathic behaviors on a broad scale.
What's in a Message? The Longitudinal Influence of a Supportive Versus Combative Orientation on the Performance of Non-Profits
Keith Botner, Arul Mishra & Himanshu Mishra
Journal of Marketing Research, forthcoming
In this article, the authors propose that in the long term, a non-profit organization with a supportively-oriented positioning (e.g., for a cause) is likely to survive for longer and achieve greater donations compared to a non-profit with a combative orientation (e.g., fighting against something). To test this proposition, the authors adopted a three-pronged approach that (1) used publicly available financial data from non-profits' tax filings over a ten year period, (2) measured annual donor pledges from a field study with a registered non-profit organization and (3) examined actual donation behavior of participants in a longitudinal lab study. Moreover, this proposition is tested for donations of money as well as time. The authors consider different theoretical mechanisms that might be at work in causing the proposed effect, such as regulatory focus theory, inertia in giving, and the preponderance of supportive charities.
Neural and cognitive characteristics of extraordinary altruists
Abigail Marsh et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, forthcoming
Altruistic behavior improves the welfare of another individual while reducing the altruist's welfare. Humans' tendency to engage in altruistic behaviors is unevenly distributed across the population, and individual variation in altruistic tendencies may be genetically mediated. Although neural endophenotypes of heightened or extreme antisocial behavior tendencies have been identified in, for example, studies of psychopaths, little is known about the neural mechanisms that support heightened or extreme prosocial or altruistic tendencies. In this study, we used structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging to assess a population of extraordinary altruists: altruistic kidney donors who volunteered to donate a kidney to a stranger. Such donations meet the most stringent definitions of altruism in that they represent an intentional behavior that incurs significant costs to the donor to benefit an anonymous, nonkin other. Functional imaging and behavioral tasks included face-emotion processing paradigms that reliably distinguish psychopathic individuals from controls. Here we show that extraordinary altruists can be distinguished from controls by their enhanced volume in right amygdala and enhanced responsiveness of this structure to fearful facial expressions, an effect that predicts superior perceptual sensitivity to these expressions. These results mirror the reduced amygdala volume and reduced responsiveness to fearful facial expressions observed in psychopathic individuals. Our results support the possibility of a neural basis for extraordinary altruism. We anticipate that these findings will expand the scope of research on biological mechanisms that promote altruistic behaviors to include neural mechanisms that support affective and social responsiveness.
Hey Look at Me: The Effect of Giving Circles on Giving
Dean Karlan & Margaret McConnell
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, October 2014, Pages 402-412
We conduct a randomized field experiment with a Yale service club and find that the promise of public recognition increases giving. Some may claim that they give when offered public recognition in order to motivate others to give too, rather than for the more obvious expected private gain from increasing one's social standing. To tease apart these two theories, we also conduct a laboratory experiment with undergraduates. We find that patterns of giving are more consistent with a desire to improve social image than a purely altruistic desire to motivate others' contributions. We discuss the external validity of our lab findings for other settings.
Visceral needs and donation decisions: Do people identify with suffering or with relief?
Inbal Harel & Tehila Kogut
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, January 2015, Pages 24-29
We examine the relations between people's experience of an ongoing visceral need (hunger) as well as the relief from that need and the willingness to help needy others actively experiencing the same or a different need. Results of two studies - one asking participants about the amount of time that had elapsed since they last ate and the other manipulating levels of hunger by asking people to fast before the experiment - reveal that overall, people tend to be more generous when satisfied than when actively experiencing a visceral need. When people experience an ongoing need, they tend to be less responsive to others' needs even when those needs match their own visceral state. However, experiencing partial relief from a recent visceral need, like eating something after a few hours of fasting, promotes the helping of others who are experiencing a corresponding need (hunger) but does not promote helping in general.
Common Identity and the Voluntary Provision of Public Goods: An Experimental Investigation
Sherry Xin Li
University of Texas Working Paper, June 2014
We conduct a framed field experiment in two Dallas neighborhoods to examine how common identity affects individual contributions to local public goods. The participants' common identity is primed to make neighborhood membership salient before individuals make donations to local non-profit organizations. We find that the effect of the identity prime is sensitive to community context, increasing the likelihood of giving in the mid-income neighborhood, but decreasing giving in the poor neighborhood. The impact is statistically significant for women, but not for men, and is partially mediated by individuals' beliefs about whether others in their neighborhoods give.
Vagal Activity Is Quadratically Related to Prosocial Traits, Prosocial Emotions, and Observer Perceptions of Prosociality
Aleksandr Kogan et al.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
In the present article, we introduce the quadratic vagal activity-prosociality hypothesis, a theoretical framework for understanding the vagus nerve's involvement in prosociality. We argue that vagus nerve activity supports prosocial behavior by regulating physiological systems that enable emotional expression, empathy for others' mental and emotional states, the regulation of one's own distress, and the experience of positive emotions. However, we contend that extremely high levels of vagal activity can be detrimental to prosociality. We present 3 studies providing support for our model, finding consistent evidence of a quadratic relationship between respiratory sinus arrhythmia - the degree to which the vagus nerve modulates the heart rate - and prosociality. Individual differences in vagal activity were quadratically related to prosocial traits (Study 1), prosocial emotions (Study 2), and outside ratings of prosociality by complete strangers (Study 3). Thus, too much or too little vagal activity appears to be detrimental to prosociality. The present article provides the 1st theoretical and empirical account of the nonlinear relationship between vagal activity and prosociality.
Does generosity beget generosity? The relationships between transfer receipt and formal and informal volunteering
Charlene Kalenkoski
Review of Economics of the Household, September 2014, Pages 547-563
This paper examines whether receipt of public or private assistance is associated with recipients' own generosity in the form of formal and informal volunteering. Using matched data from the 2007-2011 American Time Use Survey and the Annual Social and Economic Supplement to the Current Population Survey, this paper finds that receipt of private assistance from friends and relatives is negatively associated with the time women spend caring for non-household adults and the time men spend caring for non-household children. Receipt of public assistance is found to be negatively associated with men's care of non-household adults. No associations are found between either type of assistance and time spent volunteering for a formal organization.
Cooperation and conflict: Field experiments in Northern Ireland
Antonio Silva & Ruth Mace
Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biological Science, 7 October 2014
The idea that cohesive groups, in which individuals help each other, have a competitive advantage over groups composed of selfish individuals has been widely suggested as an explanation for the evolution of cooperation in humans. Recent theoretical models propose the coevolution of parochial altruism and intergroup conflict, when in-group altruism and out-group hostility contribute to the group's success in these conflicts. However, the few empirical attempts to test this hypothesis do not use natural groups and conflate measures of in-group and unbiased cooperative behaviour. We conducted field experiments based on naturalistic measures of cooperation (school/charity donations and lost letters' returns) with two religious groups with an on-going history of conflict - Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland. Conflict was associated with reduced donations to out-group schools and the return of out-group letters, but we found no evidence that it influences in-group cooperation. Rather, socio-economic status was the major determinant of cooperative behaviour. Our study presents a challenge to dominant perspectives on the origins of human cooperation, and has implications for initiatives aiming to promote conflict resolution and social cohesion.
Saturday, October 4, 2014
Strange attractor
Couple Longevity in the Era of Same-Sex Marriage in the United States
Michael Rosenfeld
Journal of Marriage and Family, October 2014, Pages 905–918
The author used a new longitudinal data set, the How Couples Meet and Stay Together surveys (N = 3,009), to generate the first nationally representative comparison of same-sex couple stability and heterosexual couple stability in the United States. He measured the association between marriage (by several definitions of marriage) and couple longevity for same-sex couples in the United States. Reports of same-sex relationship instability in the past were due in part to the low rate of marriages among same-sex couples. After controlling for marriage and marriage-like commitments, the break-up rate for same-sex couples was comparable to (and not statistically distinguishable from) the break-up rate for heterosexual couples. The results revealed that same-sex couples who had a marriage-like commitment had stable unions regardless of government recognition. A variety of predictors of relationship dissolution for heterosexual and for same-sex couples are explored.
Marital status, gender, and sexual orientation: Implications for employment hiring decisions
Joel Nadler & Katie Kufahl
Psychology of Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity, September 2014, Pages 270-278
Marital status and sexual orientation discrimination has been largely underresearched and has not been researched using working professionals, or with the incorporation of sexual orientation, marital status, and gender interactions. Additionally, with the growing acceptance of same-sex relationships, marriages, and partnerships, the interaction of marital status (i.e., applicants with or without a spouse) and sexual orientation bias in the workplace needs to be examined. Our study used an experimental design that manipulated gender, marital status, and sexual orientation in interview simulations and examined participants' (N = 365 working adults) hiring decisions. A significant 3-way interaction was found such that single lesbian women received significantly higher ratings when compared with married lesbian women, and married heterosexual women received significantly higher ratings compared with single heterosexual women. The study revealed that sexual orientation interacted with marital status in women's ratings, but not for men. This research updates current knowledge about discrimination in employment settings and provides updated information on a topic for which the existing research has been largely outdated and underresearched.
Male and Female He Created Them: Gender Traditionalism, Masculine Images of God, and Attitudes Toward Same-Sex Unions
Andrew Whitehead
Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, September 2014, Pages 479–496
Prior research demonstrates that religion and gender traditionalism are associated with less favorable attitudes toward same-sex unions because of its deviation from customary religious doctrine and traditional patterns of gender behavior. This study examines the link between religion, gender traditionalism, and attitudes toward same-sex unions by utilizing a novel measure of gender traditionalism that is distinctly religious as well. Recent work on images of God reveals that individuals' views of the divine provide a glimpse of their underlying view of reality. The results suggest that individuals who view God as a "he" are much less favorable toward same-sex unions than those who do not view God as masculine, even while controlling for gender traditionalist beliefs and other images of God. Individuals who view God as masculine are signaling a belief in an underlying gendered reality that influences their perceptions of the proper ordering of that reality, which extends to marriage patterns. These findings encourage future research to identify innovative measures of religion that incorporate aspects of other social institutions to account for their interconnected nature.
Feminist activist women are masculinized in terms of digit-ratio and social dominance: A possible explanation for the feminist paradox
Guy Madison et al.
Frontiers in Psychology, September 2014
The feminist movement purports to improve conditions for women, and yet only a minority of women in modern societies self-identify as feminists. This is known as the feminist paradox. It has been suggested that feminists exhibit both physiological and psychological characteristics associated with heightened masculinization, which may predispose women for heightened competitiveness, sex-atypical behaviors, and belief in the interchangeability of sex roles. If feminist activists, i.e., those that manufacture the public image of feminism, are indeed masculinized relative to women in general, this might explain why the views and preferences of these two groups are at variance with each other. We measured the 2D:4D digit ratios (collected from both hands) and a personality trait known as dominance (measured with the Directiveness scale) in a sample of women attending a feminist conference. The sample exhibited significantly more masculine 2D:4D and higher dominance ratings than comparison samples representative of women in general, and these variables were furthermore positively correlated for both hands. The feminist paradox might thus to some extent be explained by biological differences between women in general and the activist women who formulate the feminist agenda.
The Impact of Legal Inequalty on Relational Power in Planned Lesbian Families
Jonniann Butterfield & Irene Padavic
Gender & Society, October 2014, Pages 752-774
Lesbian families have the potential to create families unmarked by the inequalities of power often found in cross-sex relationships. Yet, based on interviews with 27 women with children in such relationships, we find that living in a state that legally restricts the rights of nonbirth parents to child contact if the couple relationship dissolves severely undermines this possibility. Nonbirth parents engaged in three fear-induced strategies that were at odds with these couples' desire for equitable partnership: acquiescing to the birth mother's wishes; making themselves financially, emotionally, and legally indispensable; and using communities to police partners' behavior and ensure accountability. As a result, the potential for such families to model egalitarian family forms that would help destabilize established gender patterns is diminished. We conclude by pointing to the importance of galvanizing to remove the remaining laws prohibiting second-parent adoption and by discussing strategies for social change.
The development of online cross-group relationships among university students: Benefits of earlier (vs. later) disclosure of stigmatized group membership
Cara MacInnis & Gordon Hodson
Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, forthcoming
With our social lives increasingly experienced online, it is critical to understand online relationship development. The current study examined the outcomes of disclosing stigmatized group membership (i.e., being gay or lesbian) earlier (vs. later) in a developing online relationship. Heterosexuals (n = 214) engaged in an experimentally controlled closeness-inducing online interaction with an ostensible partner, learning that he/she was gay/lesbian either before (i.e., earlier) or after (i.e., later) the interaction. Earlier (vs. later) discovery led to a subjectively more positive contact experience, which predicted heightened bond with the partner, itself predicting more positive attitudes toward the partner. Outcomes were uninfluenced by pretest biases and authoritarianism, suggesting the general benefits of disclosing gay/lesbian identity earlier (vs. later) in online relationships.
Divorce in Norwegian Same-Sex Marriages and Registered Partnerships: The Role of Children
Kenneth Aarskaug Wiik, Ane Seierstad & Turid Noack
Journal of Marriage and Family, October 2014, Pages 919–929
Using Norwegian register data on the total population of same-sex couples who formalized their unions from 1993 through 2010 (N = 3,422, 52% male), this study addressed the level and correlates of divorce among these couples as compared with all opposite-sex marriages in the same period (N = 407,495). In particular, the authors investigated the role of same-sex parenting, which has received little study so far. Multivariate results confirmed that same-sex couples had a higher divorce risk compared with opposite-sex couples and that female couples were more divorce prone than male couples. Furthermore, having children was negatively related to divorce among female couples, whereas male couples with common children were more divorce prone than their childless counterparts. No evidence was found that the gender gap in divorce or the difference between same-sex and opposite-sex couples narrowed over the study period.
Relationships between digit ratio (2D:4D) and female competitive rowing performance
Melissa Hull et al.
American Journal of Human Biology, forthcoming
Objective: To examine the relationship between 2D:4D and measured on-water rowing performance in young females competing at the Australian Rowing Championships.
Methods: Using an observational, cross-sectional design, female rowers (n = 69, aged 12–30 years) who competed in single sculls events at the Australian Rowing Championships in 2007 and 2008 had numerous physical and digital anthropometric measurements taken, including 2D:4D measurements. Relationships between 2D:4Ds and race times were examined using Pearson's correlations, partial correlations and multiple regression. Partial Least Squares regression analysis determined the strength of the 2D:4D as a predictor of race time relative to 78 body dimensions plus age.
Results: Overall, weak to strong positive correlations between 2D:4D and race time were found; that is, females with smaller 2D:4Ds had faster race times than females with larger 2D:4Ds. Relationships were weak to moderate for all females (r = 0.29–0.32), moderate-to-strong for senior rowers (aged ≥20 years; r = 0.42–0.55), and weak for junior rowers (aged <20 years; r = 0.13–0.18), with all relationships persisting following adjustment for age. Partial Least Squares regression analysis showed that 2D:4Ds had high predictive importance relative to other body dimensions.
Conclusions: Females with smaller 2D:4Ds rowed substantially faster than females with larger 2D:4Ds, with the 2D:4D possibly linked to underlying characteristics that have been optimized over time resulting in better rowing performance.
Sexual orientation disparities in mental health: The moderating role of educational attainment
David Barnes et al.
Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, September 2014, Pages 1447-1454
Purpose: Mental health disparities between sexual minorities and heterosexuals remain inadequately understood, especially across levels of educational attainment. The purpose of the present study was to test whether education modifies the association between sexual orientation and mental disorder.
Methods: We compared the odds of past 12-month and lifetime psychiatric disorder prevalence (any Axis-I, any mood, any anxiety, any substance use, and comorbidity) between lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) and heterosexual individuals by educational attainment (those with and without a bachelor's degree), adjusting for covariates, and tested for interaction between sexual orientation and educational attainment. Data are drawn from the National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions, a nationally representative survey of non-institutionalized US adults (N = 34,653; 577 LGB).
Results: Sexual orientation disparities in mental health are smaller among those with a college education. Specifically, the disparity in those with versus those without a bachelor's degree was attenuated by 100 % for any current mood disorder, 82 % for any current Axis-I disorder, 76 % for any current anxiety disorder, and 67 % for both any current substance use disorder and any current comorbidity. Further, the interaction between sexual orientation and education was statistically significant for any current Axis-I disorder, any current mood disorder, and any current anxiety disorder. Our findings for lifetime outcomes were similar.
Conclusions: The attenuated mental health disparity at higher education levels underscores the particular risk for disorder among LGBs with less education. Future studies should consider selection versus causal factors to explain the attenuated disparity we found at higher education levels.
Pink gives girls permission: Exploring the roles of explicit gender labels and gender-typed colors on preschool children's toy preferences
Erica Weisgram, Megan Fulcher & Lisa Dinella
Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, September–October 2014, Pages 401–409
Children engage in gender-typed toy play to a greater extent than in non-gender-typed toy play leading to different developmental trajectories for boys and girls. The present studies examine the characteristics of toys and how they differentially affect boys' and girls' interests, stereotypes, and judgments of the toys. In Study 1, children (N = 73, Mage = 4.01) were presented with masculine and feminine toys that were decorated with masculine and feminine colors. Results indicated that boys were more interested in masculine toys than in feminine toys. Girls were significantly less interested in masculine toys with masculine colors than in all other combinations. Children's perceptions of others' interests also followed a similar pattern. In Study 2, children (N = 42, Mage = 3.84) were presented with novel items labeled as "for boys" and "for girls" and decorated in masculine and feminine colors. Among girls, both explicit labels and color of novel toys impacted interests. Children's predictions of others' interests also reflected this pattern.
Searching For Evidence of Acculturation: Attitudes Toward Homosexuality Among Migrants Moving From Eastern to Western Europe
Rory Fitzgerald, Lizzy Winstone & Yvette Prestage
International Journal of Public Opinion Research, Autumn 2014, Pages 323-341
Attitudes toward gay men and lesbians are generally more tolerant in Western than in Eastern Europe. This study uses data from the first five rounds of the European Social Survey to examine acculturation among migrants moving from Eastern Europe to Western Europe, in terms of attitudes toward gay men and lesbians. After controlling for background factors associated with attitudes toward homosexuality, we find evidence of acculturation, whereby attitudes become more tolerant — and more typical of those prevalent in Western Europe — with longer residency in this region. This study builds on existing research into cross-national differences in attitudes toward homosexuality and extends the existing North American literature on acculturation to a European context.
Friday, October 3, 2014
The Value of the Revolving Door: Political Appointees and the Stock Market
Simon Luechinger & Christoph Moser
Journal of Public Economics, forthcoming
We analyze stock market reactions to announcements of political appointments from the private sector and corporate appointments of former government officials. Using unique data on corporate affiliations and announcements of all Senate-confirmed U.S. Defense Department appointees of six administrations, we find positive abnormal returns for political appointments. These estimates are not driven by important observations, volatile stocks, industry-wide developments or the omission of further commonly used return predictors. Placebo events for close competitors and alternative dates yield no effects. Effects are larger for top government positions and less anticipated announcements. We also find positive abnormal returns for corporate appointments and positive effects of political connections on procurement volume. Our results suggest that concerns over conflicts of interest created by the revolving door seem justified, even in a country with strong institutions.
Too Close for Comfort? Geographic Propinquity to Political Power and Stock Returns
Christos Pantzalis & Jung Chul Park
Journal of Banking & Finance, November 2014, Pages 57-78
We show that firm headquarters' geographic proximity to political power centers (state capitals) is associated with higher abnormal returns. Consistent with the notion that this effect is rooted in social network links, we find it is more pronounced in communities with high levels of sociability and political values' homophily, and that it dissipates when firms move their headquarters to another state. Finally, in line with the view that investors perceive such networks to be associated with political risk, we find that this effect is particularly strong when there are substantial levels of corruption, dependency on government spending, and politicians' turnover.
How Do Citizens React When Politicians Support Policies They Oppose? Field Experiments with Elite Communication
David Broockman & Daniel Butler
University of California Working Paper, September 2014
Politicians have been depicted as, alternatively, strongly constrained by public opinion, able to shape public opinion if they persuasively appeal to citizens' values, or relatively unconstrained by public opinion and able to shape it merely by announcing their positions. We conduct unique field experiments in cooperation with legislators to explore how constituents react when legislators take positions they oppose. For the experiments, state legislators sent their constituents official communications with randomly assigned content. In some letters, the representatives took positions on salient issues these constituents opposed, sometimes supported by extensive arguments but sometimes minimally justified. Results from an ostensibly unrelated telephone survey show that citizens often adopted their representatives' issue positions even when representatives offered little justification. Moreover, citizens did not evaluate their representatives more negatively when representatives took positions citizens opposed. These findings suggest politicians can enjoy broad latitude to shape public opinion.
Institutional Design and the Attribution of Presidential Control: Insulating the President from Blame
Alex Ruder
Quarterly Journal of Political Science, Summer 2014, Pages 301-335
A lack of direct electoral checks on government bureaucrats challenges norms of democratic accountability. One proposed solution is to increase the president's control over federal agencies. It is, however, an open question as to whether voters will attribute responsibility to the president even when in charge of agencies. A key empirical challenge has been that presidential control is not randomly assigned across agencies. To overcome this issue, I compare two agencies that enforce the same policy but differ in insulation from presidential control. I examine a large, unique dataset of news coverage, showing that news coverage of the presidentially-controlled agency features more politicized content that ties the agency to the president. I then demonstrate experimentally that this political content increases attribution of control to the president. The results support theories that claim agency design moderates voter attribution of responsibility to the president. This paper broadly adds to the literature on institutional design and the determinants of agency discretion.
For fear of popular politics? Public attention and the delegation of authority to the United States executive branch
Stéphane Lavertu
Regulation & Governance, forthcoming
Legislators are thought to delegate policymaking authority to administrative actors either to avoid blame for controversial policy or to secure policy outcomes. This study tests these competing perspectives and establishes that public attention to policymaking is a powerful predictor of the extent to which significant United States statutes delegate authority to the executive branch. Consistent with the policy-concerns perspective, by one calculation statutes dealing with high-attention issues entail 48 percent fewer delegating provisions than statutes dealing with low-attention issues - a far stronger relationship than is typically found in the delegation literature. As per the blame-avoidance perspective, a number of additional analyses yield results consistent with the notion that fears about future public attention motivate statutory delegation if legislative conflict is sufficiently great. Overall, however, the results suggest that conflict typically is not sufficiently great and that legislators are generally more inclined to limit statutory delegation when the public is paying attention.
The two faces of congressional roll-call voting
Stephen Jessee & Sean Theriault
Party Politics, forthcoming
Most analyses of congressional voting, whether theoretical or empirical, treat all roll-call votes in the same way. We argue that such approaches mask considerable variation in voting behaviour across different types of votes. In examining all roll-call votes in the U.S. House of Representatives from the 93rd to the 110th Congresses (1973-2008), we find that the forces affecting legislators' voting on procedural and final passage matters have exhibited important changes over time, with differences between these two vote types becoming larger, particularly in recent congresses. These trends have important implications not only on how we study congressional voting behaviour, but also in how we evaluate representation and polarization in the modern Congress.
Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed From Something Blue: Experiments on Dual Viewing TV and Twitter
Jaclyn Cameron & Nick Geidner
Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, Summer 2014, Pages 400-419
The use of second screens to dual-view television and social media is exponentially increasing. As a result, television producers are increasingly augmenting television content with social media comments from viewers, which may serve as a type of real-time public opinion indicator. The current research effort utilizes two experimental studies to explore the effects of this new media production practice on viewer's attitudes and opinions. In these studies, a Twitter feed was integrated in to entertainment (Study 1) and political (Study 2) television broadcasts and manipulated to convey either positive or negative opinions of the content. Participants' opinions were found to conform to the majority opinion presented in the manipulated Twitter feed in nearly all of the analyses. Implications for dual viewing and second screen use are discussed in light of findings.
Politicians, Bureaucrats and Targeted Redistribution
Ruben Enikolopov
Journal of Public Economics, forthcoming
The paper argues that for political reasons elected politicians are more likely to be engaged in targeted redistribution than appointed bureaucrats. It uses the example of patronage jobs in the U.S. local governments to provide empirical support for this claim. It shows that the number of public employees is higher for elected chief executives. This difference is stronger in public services with bigger private-public wage differential and it increases during election years. It also finds that the number of public employees increases with the age of bureaucrats while there is no such relationship in the case of politicians, which is consistent with younger bureaucrats having stronger career concerns.
The Structure of Political Institutions and Effectiveness of Corporate Political Lobbying
Seong-Jin Choi, Nan Jia & Jiangyong Lu
Organization Science, forthcoming
This paper investigates how the structure of political institutions influences the effectiveness of corporate political lobbying by shaping the "veto points" and "entry points" that lobbying firms encounter and require, respectively, when attempting to influence public policies; in so doing, this study deepens our understanding of the strategic implications of institutional environments. Using large-sample and cross-country firm-level data, we find that the influence of firms' lobbying activities on public policies is weakened when there are tighter constraints generated as a result of greater political (partisan) competition and more subnational government tiers. We find that the negative association between the effectiveness of lobbying and political (partisan) competition is particularly pronounced in countries with lower electoral accountability and that the negative association between the effectiveness of lobbying and subnational government tiers is particularly pronounced in more centralized political systems.
Sunsets and Federal Lawmaking: Evidence from the 110th Congress
Frank Fagan & Fırat Bilgel
International Review of Law and Economics, March 2015, Pages 1-6
We test the hypothesis that the choice to include a sunset provision increases the likelihood that a bill becomes law. We develop a model where the legislator's knowledge of the increase in passage probability from including a sunset provision influences the legislator's choice to do so. Because legislators may either include a sunset provision to increase passage probability, or observe low passage probability and respond with a sunset provision, the choice to include a sunset provision is endogenous. Consequently, the causal effect of temporary enactment is identified by using the legislator's number of offspring as a source of exogenous variation in the choice to include a sunset provision. Employing recursive bivariate probit, we find that the average causal effect of including a sunset provision is sixty percent. We also find that the average causal effect of including sunset provisions in bills that already include them is about twenty percent.
Presidential Priorities, Congressional Control, and the Quality of Regulatory Analysis: An Application to Health Care and Homeland Security
Jerry Ellig & Christopher Conover
Public Choice, forthcoming
Elected leaders delegate rulemaking to federal agencies, then seek to influence rulemaking via top-down directives and statutory deadlines. This paper documents an unintended consequence of these control strategies: they reduce regulatory agencies' ability and incentive to conduct high-quality economic analysis to inform their decisions. Using scoring data that measure the quality of regulatory impact analysis, we find that hastily-adopted "interim final" regulations reflecting signature policy priorities of the two most recent presidential administrations were accompanied by significantly lower-quality economic analysis. Interim final homeland security regulations adopted during the G.W. Bush administration and interim final regulations implementing the Affordable Care Act in the Obama administration were accompanied by less thorough analysis than other "economically significant" regulations (regulations with benefits, costs, or other economic impacts exceeding $100 million annually). The lower quality analysis apparently stems from the confluence of presidential priorities and very tight statutory deadlines associated with interim final regulations, rather than either factor alone.
Raphaël Levy
Journal of Public Economics, forthcoming
We consider a political agency model where voters learn information about some policy-relevant variable, which they can ignore when it impedes their desire to hold optimistic beliefs. Voters' excessive tendency to sustain optimism may result in inefficient political decision-making because political courage does not pay off when voters have poor information. However, voters infer information from policies and incentives to ignore bad news decrease when policy-making is more efficient. This generates multiple equilibria: an equilibrium where voters face up to the reality and politicians have political support to implement optimal policies, and another where they shy away from reforms to cater to the electorate's demand for soothing policies.
Incumbent-Quality Advantage and Counterfactual Electoral Stagnation in the US Senate
Ivan Pastine, Tuvana Pastine & Paul Redmond
Politics, forthcoming
This article examines the extent to which electoral selection based on candidate quality alone can account for the pattern of re-election rates in the US Senate. In the absence of officeholder benefits, electoral selection is simulated using observed dropout rates from 1946 to 2010. This provides a benchmark for the re-election rate that would be generated by incumbent quality advantage alone. The simulation delivers a re-election rate that is almost identical to the observed rate prior to 1980, at around 78 per cent. In the later subsample, quality-based selection generates a re-election rate that is seven percentage points lower than observed. The divergence in the re-election rates in the later subsample is consistent with the findings of vote margin studies that indicate rising incumbency advantage due to officeholder benefits. In addition, it is found here that the quality-based selection first-term re-election rate is significantly lower than the observed first-term re-election rate. This result supports sophomore surge vote margin studies of officeholder benefits.
The Decline of Daily Newspapers and the Third-Person Effect
Martin Johnson, Kirby Goidel & Michael Climek
Social Science Quarterly, forthcoming
Objective: In this article, we investigate the third-person effect within the context of the decision by the New Orleans Times-Picayune in September 2012 to end daily print circulation in favor of a three-day-per-week publication schedule and online news offerings.
Methods: We utilize original survey data based on 1,043 telephone interviews with respondents living in the greater New Orleans area, including 530 landline respondents selected via random digit dialing and 513 respondents randomly selected from available cellular telephone blocks.
Results: We find evidence of a third-person effect on judgments about changes at The Times-Picayune. New Orleans area residents worry that the decline of information will negatively affect the ability of others to keep up with the news. We also show that the effects are contingent upon physical location. The greater the distance from New Orleans, the more pronounced concerns are about the effect of the loss of this daily information source on others in the community.
Conclusions: To date, third-person effects have generally been studied within the context of enduring and established forms of communication, especially those viewed as having potential negative effects - politically biased messages, other forms of propaganda, and communication that could harm reputations. In this article, we extend this work to show third-person effects persist within the context of declining news coverage.
Effects of Journalistic Adjudication on Factual Beliefs, News Evaluations, Information Seeking, and Epistemic Political Efficacy
Raymond James Pingree, Dominique Brossard & Douglas McLeod
Mass Communication and Society, September/October 2014, Pages 615-638
A frequent critique of contemporary journalism is that journalists rarely adjudicate factual disputes when covering politics; however, very little research has been done on the effects of such passive journalism on audiences. This study tests effects of active adjudication versus "he said/she said" journalism on a variety of outcomes, finding that adjudication can correct factual beliefs, increase perceived news quality, satisfy perceived informational needs, and increase the likelihood of future news use. However, for readers who were less interested in the issues under dispute, adjudication also reduced epistemic political efficacy, which is confidence in one's ability to find the truth in politics.
Wealth, Officeholding, and Elite Demand for Slavery in Antebellum Georgia
Jason Poulos
University of California Working Paper, August 2014
This paper uses the first large-scale land lottery in US history to identify the effects of randomly-induced wealth on officeholding and the ideology of politicians. First, I link records from the 1805 Georgia land lottery to a roster of state politicians and estimate the effect of winning a lottery prize on ex-post officeholding. Lottery winners are 1.2% more likely to hold office compared to lottery losers (N = 21,612; p < 0.001). The treatment effect is larger for lottery winners who received higher-valued land lots. Second, I restrict the sample to members of the Georgia Assembly and measure support for slavery using roll call votes. Winning a lottery prize increases support for slavery by 7%, although this effect may be due to chance (N = 174; p = 0.220). The results demonstrate that wealth has a robust effect on officeholding, but does not significantly effect the ideology of politicians.