Progress Daily

People seem to be more motivated by the thought of losing something than the thought of gaining something of equal value. Homeowners told how much money they could lose from inadequate insulation are more likely to insulate their homes than those told how much money they could save (“Increasing the Effectiveness of Energy Auditors,” 1988). Pamphlets urging women to check for breast cancer are significantly more successful if they state their case in terms of what stands to be lost rather than gained (“The Effect of Message Framing on Breast Self-Examination Attitudes, Intentions, and Behavior,” 1987).

One reason for the potency of the scarcity principle is that, by following it, we are usually and efficiently right (“Scarcity Effects on Desirability,” Wm Michael Lynn, 1989).

When increasing scarcity – or anything else – interferes with our prior access to some item we will want and try to possess the item more than before (”Psychological Reactance and the Attractiveness of Unattainable Objects,” Sharon Brehm, 1981).

In one study, boys (averaging 24 months in age) accompanied their mothers into a room containing two equally attractive toys. The toys were always arranged so that one stood next to a transparent Plexiglas barrier and the other stood behind the barrier. For some of the boys, the Plexiglas sheet formed no real barrier to the toy behind it, since the boys could easily reach over the top. For the other boys, the Plexiglas was higher, effectively blocking their access to one toy unless they went around the barrier. When the barrier was too short to restrict access to the toy behind it, the boys showed no special preference for either of the toys; on the average, the toy next to the barrier was touched just as quickly as the one behind it. When the barrier was high enough to be a true obstacle, the boys went directly to the obstructed toy, making contact with it 3 times faster than with the unobstructed toy. (“Physical barriers and psychological reactance,” 1977)

(Girls in the study did not show the same resistant response to the large barrier as did the boys. It appears that girls are primarily reactant to restrictions that come from other people rather than from physical barriers.)

Almost invariably, our response to the banning of information is a greater desire to receive that information and a more favorable attitude toward it than before the ban. (“Censorship as an Attitude Change Induction,” by Richard D. Ashmore; “The Effects of Censorship and Attractiveness of the Censor on Attitude Change,” by Stephen Worchel, etc.; “The Effect of Censorship on Attitude Change”; and “Beyond a Commodity Theory Analysis of Censorship”)

A judge’s declaration of inadmissibility may lead jurors to use the evidence to a greater extent (“The University of Chicago Jury Project”).

We find a piece of information more persuasive if we think we can’t get it elsewhere (”A Commodity Theory Analysis of Persuasion” and “Liberalization of Commodity Theory”).

In an customer-preference study by Stephen Worchel, a cookie apparently in short supply was rated as more desirable to eat in the future, more attractive as a consumer item, and more costly than the identical cookie in abundant supply. By manipulating the number of cookies in the cookie jar, Worchel also showed that a drop from abundance to scarcity produced a decidedly more positive reaction to the cookies than did constant scarcity. (“Effects of supply and demand on ratings of objective value”)

According to James C. Davies, we are most likely to find revolutions where a period of improving economic and social conditions is followed by a short, sharp reversal. From 1940 to the mid-‘50s, the family income of American black families compared to comparably educated white families rose from 56% to 80%. By 1962, however, it had fallen to 62%, and rioting followed. (“The J-Curve of Rising and Declining Satisfaction as a Course of Some Great Revolutions and a Contained Revolution” and “Toward a Theory of Revolution”)

Influence, Robert B. Cialdini, Ph.D.

Mark Aguiar and Erik Hurst combined the results of several large surveys of leisure.In 1965, the average man spent 42 hours a week working at the office or the factory; throw in breaks and commuting time, and you’re up to 51 hours. Today he spends 36 and 40. Overall, depending on exactly what you count, he’s got an extra 6 to 8 hours a week of leisure — the equivalent of 9 extra weeks of vacation per year.

For women, time spent on the job is up from 17 hours a week to 24. With breaks and commuting thrown in, it’s up from 20 hours to 26. But time spent on household chores is down from 35 hours a week to 22, for a net leisure gain of 4 to 6 hours. 5 extra vacation weeks.

The average American is older now and has fewer children, but even when you compare them to their 1965 counterparts — people with the same family size, age, and education — the gains are still on the order of 4 to 8 hours a week, or something like 7 extra weeks of leisure per year.

The biggest leisure gains have gone to those with the most stagnant incomes — the least skilled and the least educated. The smallest leisure gains have been concentrated among the most educated, the group that’s had the biggest gains in income.

“The Theory of the Leisure Class,” by Steven E. Landsburg

Occasionally we’re surprised into laughing at something funny, but most laughter has little to do with humor. It’s an instinctual survival tool for social animals, not an intellectual response to wit.

Robert R. Provine went out into natural habitats — city sidewalks, suburban malls — and carefully observed thousands of “laugh episodes.” He found that 80% to 90% of them came after straight lines like “I know” or “I’ll see you guys later.”

He found that most speakers, particularly women, did more laughing than their listeners, using the laughs as punctuation for their sentences. It’s a largely involuntary process. People can consciously suppress laughs, but few can make themselves laugh convincingly.

The human ha-ha evolved from the rhythmic sound — pant-pant — made by primates like chimpanzees when they tickle and chase one other while playing. Jaak Panksepp discovered that rats emit an ultrasonic chirp (inaudible to humans without special equipment) when they’re tickled, and they like the sensation so much they keep coming back for more tickling.

“Primal laughter evolved as a signaling device to highlight readiness for friendly interaction,” Panksepp says.

Humans are laughing by the age of four months. Laughter can be used cruelly to reinforce a group’s solidarity and pride by mocking deviants and insulting outsiders, but mainly it’s a subtle social lubricant. It’s a way to make friends and also make clear who belongs where in the status hierarchy.

Tyler F. Stillman, Roy Baumeister and Nathan DeWall inflicted unfunny jokes on undergraduate women last year at Florida State University, during interviews for what was ostensibly a study of their spending habits. Some of the women were told the interviewer would be awarding a substantial cash prize to a few of the participants, like a boss deciding which underling deserved a bonus.

The women put in the underling position were a lot more likely to laugh at the lame jokes than were women in the control group. But it wasn’t just because these underlings were trying to manipulate the boss, as was demonstrated in a follow-up experiment.

This time each of the women watched a joke being told on videotape by a person who was ostensibly going to be working with her on a task. There was supposed to be a cash reward afterward to be allocated by a designated boss. In some cases the woman watching was designated the boss; in other cases she was the underling or a co-worker of the person on the videotape.

When the woman watching was the boss, she didn’t laugh much at the jokes. But when she was the underling or a co-worker, she laughed much more, even though the joke-teller wasn’t in the room to see her. When you’re low in the status hierarchy, you need all the allies you can find, so apparently you’re primed to chuckle at anything even if it doesn’t do you any immediate good.

“What’s So Funny? Well, Maybe Nothing,” by John Tierney

Thought experiment: Assume that you round up a thousand people randomly. If you add to the sample the heaviest human on the planet he would represent only about 0.6 percent of the total.

By comparison, add Bill Gates, with an assumed net worth of nearly $80B, and he would represent approximately 99.9% of the group’s wealth. All the others combined would represent no more than the rounding error for his net worth, the variation of his personal portfolio over the past second.

A single event can dominate some phenomena. In such matters, you should be careful of knowledge derived from data.

These matters probably include wealth, income, book sales per author, book citations per author, name recognition as a “celebrity,” number of references on Google, populations of cities, uses of words in a vocabulary, numbers of speakers per language, damage caused by earthquakes, deaths in war, deaths from terrorist incidents, sizes of planets, sizes of companies, stock ownership, height between species (consider elephants and mice), financial markets, commodity prices, inflation rates, and economic data.

The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Dr Paul Crutzen suggests reversing global warming by spreading tiny particles in the upper atmosphere to reflect the sun’s rays. This effect has already been shown to work in nature: fine sulphate particles, called aerosols, ejected by large volcanic eruptions like that of Mount Pinatubo in 1991, have produced periods of global cooling. And sulphate pollution from industry had similar consequences, helping to balance the warming effects of carbon dioxide until the 1990s, when pollution controls in many regions had the perverse effect of increasing warming.

“Plan B for global warming?,” The Economist

In an exercise, Sigal Barsade analyzed 4 groups of people who were asked to distribute a limited amount of bonus money. Unknown to the other participants, an actor was assigned to display a different mood in each group.

When the actor showed high negativity — by frowning, raising his voice or tapping his pencil impatiently, for example — the group was much less likely to be cooperative and more likely to engage in conflict.

In groups where the actor displayed a positive response — say, by smiling and leaning forward — participants were more cooperative in allocating the money. The actor’s moods spread to others and influenced their actions but they were mostly unaware that this had happened.

According to Daniel Goleman, the bad moods that really hurt are the ones where you obsess and ruminate about what it is that’s upset you. At that point, the amygdala becomes overly active, to the point that you cannot focus on a task. “If you realize that you are caught up in one of these ruminating tape loops, don’t buy it. Realize that you don’t have to believe your thoughts. When we’re overly anxious or overly angry, our thinking is distorted.”

Moods have a biological component. Simple calming strategies like meditating, taking a walk or exercising have a physical effect on brain activity and may correct the mood.

Studies have shown that the mood of a team’s leader has much more impact on performance than that of other workers.

“Sunny or Cloudy, Moods Cast an Influence,” by Phyllis Korki

Periods of low volatility tend to encourage risk-taking. Hedge funds have a natural inclination to buy higher-yielding (and thus riskier) instruments and sell low-yielding assets, since this delivers a positive income or “carry.” When the market falters, these positions rapidly lose money. For example, the modest rise in the yen — 2.3% against the dollar on February 27th, 2007 — wiped out about half the annual interest gain accruing to investors who sold yen and bought dollars.

Investment banks use “value-at-risk” models which mean that, when volatility rises, they cut the capital they allocate to trading. This usually means selling assets. So a sudden jump in volatility tends to generate further volatility.

What matters is how many actors have all made the same bet. One of the oldest market mistakes is the assumption that you can get out of a position as easily as you entered into it. According to Goldman Sachs, the latest jump in the Vix (a measure of stockmarket volatility) took it eight standard deviations from its average. If conventional models are correct, such an event should not have happened in the history of the known universe. Then again, the move in energy prices that caused the collapse last year of Amaranth, the hedge fund, was a nine standard-deviation event.

“Grey Tuesday,” The Economist

70 years ago the average income in America’s “South” (the 11 states of the old Confederacy plus Kentucky and Oklahoma) was $314 a year. In current dollars that would be about $4,400, meaning that southerners then were about as rich as the people of Botswana are today. Half the workers in the South in the 1930s were farmers, and half of those did not own the land they farmed. The average landless cotton farmer made $73 a year ($1,023 today). Small wonder that by the late 1930s a quarter of those born in the southern countryside had emigrated to the north or to southern cities.

In 1937 southern incomes were only half the American average; today they are 91% of it. If you allow for the lower cost of living in the South, the gap all but vanishes. Since the 1960s, more whites have moved to the South than have left it. Since the 1970s, the same has been true for African-Americans. The South’s share of America’s population has risen from just over a quarter in 1960 to a third today, making it the most populous American region.

The civil war wiped out two-thirds of the South’s wealth. Roughly a quarter of able-bodied male southerners were killed or wounded. In the first year of peace, Mississippi spent a fifth of its state budget on artificial limbs.

For nearly all of its recorded history the South has been ruled by violence, or the threat of it. From 1619 until 1865, slaves had to work or be whipped. From the end of Reconstruction until the triumph of the civil-rights movement in the 1960s, southern blacks who tried to vote risked a beating or worse.

The South’s share of American GDP has risen from 22% in 1963 to 31% today.

“Goodbye to the blues,” by Robert Guest

The Survey of Americans and Economists on the Economy finds that, compared to the experts, laymen are much more skeptical of markets, especially international and labor markets, and much more pessimistic about the past, present, and future of the economy. When laymen see business conspiracies, economists see supply-and-demand. When laymen see ruinous competition from foreigners, economists see the wonder of comparative advantage. When laymen see dangerous downsizing, economists see wealth-enhancing reallocation of labor. When laymen see decline, economists see progress.

Controlling for income, income growth, job security, gender, and race only mildly reduces the size of the lay-expert belief gap. And, since the typical economist is actually a moderate Democrat, controlling for party identification and ideology makes the lay-expert belief gap get a little bigger.

The data show that no matter how much you know about a voter’s material interests, it is hard to predict how he is going to vote. In contrast, if you know what a voter thinks is best for society, you can count on him to support it.

The Survey asks respondents to say whether “too many immigrants” is a major, minor, or non-reason why the economy is not doing better than it is. 47% of non-economists think it is a major reason; 80% of economists think it is not a reason at all. Since immigrants are largely young males, and most government programs support the old, women, and children, immigrants wind up paying more in taxes than they take in benefits. (See Ronald Lee and Timothy Miller “Immigration, Social Security, and Broader Fiscal Impacts” and Julian Simon The Economic Consequences of Immigration.)

Virtually every survey finds that a solid majority of Americans wants to reduce immigration, and almost no one wants to increase immigration.

The data show that well-educated voters hold more sensible policy views. (In “What Makes People Think Like Economists?,” Caplan estimates that each step of education on a 1-7 scale has 9.3% as much effect on economic beliefs as a Ph.D. in economics.)

“The Myth of the Rational Voter,” by Bryan Caplan

About 6 in 10 Americans, according to a 2005 Harris Poll, believe in the devil and hell, and about 7 in 10 believe in angels, heaven and the existence of miracles and of life after death. A 2006 survey at Baylor University found that 92% of respondents believe in a personal God.

Assuming the presence of an “agent” (any creature with volitional, independent behavior) is more adaptive than assuming its absence. If you are a caveman on the savannah, you are better off presuming that the motion you detect out of the corner of your eye is an agent and something to run from, even if you are wrong.

An experiment from the ’40s by Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel suggested that imputing agency is so automatic that people may do it even for geometric shapes. Subjects watched a film of triangles and circles moving around. When asked what they had been watching, the subjects used words like “chase” and “capture.”

People mistake a rock for a bear, but almost no one mistakes a bear for a rock.

In the “false-belief test” children watch a puppet show with a simple plot: John comes onstage holding a marble, puts it in Box A and walks off. Mary comes onstage, opens Box A, takes out the marble, puts it in Box B and walks off. John comes back onstage. The children are asked, Where will John look for the marble?

Very young children, or autistic children of any age, say John will look in Box B, since they know that’s where the marble is. But older children respond that John will look for it in Box A.

Justin Barrett recently conducted a version of the false-belief test with a religious twist. Barrett showed young children a box with a picture of crackers on the outside. What do you think is inside this box? he asked, and the children said, “Crackers.” Next he opened it and showed them that the box was filled with rocks. Then he asked two follow-up questions: What would your mother say is inside this box? And what would God say?

As earlier theory-of-mind experiments already showed, 3- and 4-year-olds tended to think Mother was infallible, and since the children knew the right answer, they assumed she would know it, too. They usually responded that Mother would say the box contained rocks. But 5- and 6-year-olds had learned that Mother, like any other person, could hold a false belief in her mind, and they tended to respond that she would be fooled by the packaging and would say, “Crackers.”

No matter what their age, the children, who were all Protestants, told Barrett that God would answer, “Rocks.”

Children are born with a tendency to believe in omniscience.

David Sloan Wilson links group selection and the evolution of religion. Imagine flock of birds. Some birds serve as sentries, scanning the horizon for predators and calling out warnings. Having a sentry is good for the group but bad for the sentry, which is doubly harmed: by keeping watch, the sentry has less time to gather food, and by issuing a warning call, it is more likely to be spotted by the predator. So in the Darwinian struggle, the birds most likely to pass on their genes are the nonsentries.

On the other hand, if there are 10 sentries in one group and none in the other, 3 or 4 of the sentries might be sacrificed. The flock with sentries will probably outlast the flock that has no early-warning system, so the other 6 or 7 sentries will survive to pass on the genes. If the whole-group advantage outweighs the cost to any individual bird of being a sentry, then the sentry gene will prevail.

There are costs to any individual of being religious. But in terms of intergroup struggle the costs can be outweighed by the benefits of being in a cohesive group.

In 2003, Richard Sosis and Bradley Ruffle sought an explanation for why Israel’s religious communes did better on average than secular communes in the wake of the economic crash of most of the country’s kibbutzim. They based their study on a standard economic game that measures cooperation. Individuals from religious communes played the game more cooperatively, while those from secular communes tended to be more selfish. It was the men who attended synagogue daily, not the religious women or the less observant men, who showed the biggest differences.

“Darwin’s God” by Robin Marantz Henig