Progress Daily

Less than 1% of private gifts to charity are anonymous.

Dan Ariely, Anat Bracha, and Stephan Meier (”Doing Good or Doing Well? Image Motivation and Monetary Incentives in Behaving Prosocially“) conducted an experiment where the number of times participants clicked an awkward combination of computer keys determined how much money was donated on their behalf to the American Red Cross. Since 92% of participants thought highly of the Red Cross, giving to it could reasonably be assumed to make people look good to their peers. People were randomly assigned to either a private group, where only the participant knew the amount of the donation, or a public group, where the participant had to stand up at the end of the session and share this information with the group. Participants exerted much greater effort in the public case: the average number of clicks, at 900, was nearly double the average of 520 clicks in the private case.

The researchers added to their experiment a monetary reward for participants. In private, being paid to click increased effort from 548 clicks to 740, but in public, there was next to no effect. Presumably, for the public clickers, the added motivation of financial reward was offset by the reduced appearance of generosity.

“Looking good by doing good,” The Economist

In 1993, the OECD analyzed forecasts made between 1987 and 1992 by the governments of the USA, Japan, Germany, France, Italy, and Canada, as well as those of the IMF and the OECD itself. (See “How accurate are Economic Outlook projections?“) Not only were each of these organizations’ predictions abysmally inaccurate, but they would have made better predictions for inflation and gross domestic product if they had scrapped all their sophisticated economic models and simply guessed that the numbers in each year would be unchanged from the last.

Yet governments use these predictions when attempting to steer the economy.

Ubiquity by Mark Buchanan

 Researchers (John Coates, Mark Gurnell & Aldo Rustichini) at the University of Cambridge report that men with longer ring fingers, compared to their index fingers, tended to be more successful in the frantic high-frequency trading in the London financial district. (See “Second-to-fourth digit ratio predicts success among high-frequency financial traders.”)

The impact of biology on success was about equal to years of experience at the job.

(The same ring-to-index finger ratio has previously been associated with success in soccer and basketball.)

The length ratio between those two fingers is determined during the development of the fetus and the relatively longer ring finger indicates greater exposure to the male hormone androgen.

(Previous studies have found that such exposure can lead to increased confidence, risk preferences, search persistence, heightened vigilance and quickened reaction times.

In a separate study last year, the researchers researchers studied male financial traders in London, taking saliva samples in the morning and evening. They found that those with higher levels of testosterone in the morning were more likely to make an unusually big profit that day. (Testosterone affects aggression, confidence and risk-taking.)

In the new study, the researchers measured the right hands of 44 male stock traders who were engaged in a type of trade that involved rapid decision-making and quick physical reactions.

Over 20 months those with longer ring fingers compared to their index fingers made 11 times more money than those with the shortest ring fingers. Over the same time the most experienced traders made about 9 times more than the least experienced ones.

Looking only at experienced traders, the long-ring-finger folks earned 5 times more than those with short ring fingers.

“Finger length may predict financial success,” by Randolph E. Schmid

Wen Zhou & Denise Chen speculated that if humans produce and respond to sweat pheromones, then a woman should respond to a guy’s sweat when sexually aroused differently than she does to his normal sweat.

The researchers asked 20 heterosexual guys to put pads in their armpits as they watched pornographic videos and became aroused (verified by electrodes). Later, they collected the sweat they produced when they weren’t aroused. (See “Encoding Human Sexual Chemosensory Cues in the Orbitofrontal and Fusiform Cortices“)

The researchers then recruited 19 women to smell the men’s pads while undergoing (fMRI) brain scans. The sexual sweat, but not the normal sweat, activated the right orbitofrontal cortex and the right fusiform cortex, brain areas that help us recognize emotions and perceive things, respectively. Both regions are in the right hemisphere, which is generally involved in smell, social response, and emotion.

“Women Can Smell a Man’s Intentions,” Melinda Wenner