Progress Daily

According to research by Kerwin Kofi Charles, Erik Hurst and Nikolai Roussanov (”Conspicuous Consumption and Race“), conspicuous consumption serves less to establish the owner’s positive status as affluent than to fend off the negative perception that the owner is poor. The richer a society or peer group, the less important visible spending becomes.

An African American family with the same income, family size, and other demographics as a white family will spend about 25% more of its income on jewelry, cars, personal care, and apparel. For the average black family, making about $40,000 a year, that amounts to $1,900 more a year than for a comparable white family. To make up the difference, African Americans spend much less on education, health care, entertainment, and home furnishings. (The same is true of Latinos.)

The researchers hypothesized that visible consumption lets individuals show strangers they aren’t poor. Since strangers tend to lump people together by race, the lower your racial group’s income, the more valuable it is to demonstrate your personal buying power.

To test this idea, the researchers compared the spending patterns of people of the same race in different states — say, blacks in Alabama versus blacks in Massachusetts, or whites in South Carolina versus whites in California. They found that, all else being equal (including one’s own income), an individual spent more of his income on visible goods as his racial group’s income went down. In places where blacks in general have more money, individual black people feel less pressure to prove their wealth.

The same is true for whites. Controlling for differences in housing costs, an increase of $10,000 in the mean income for white households — about like going from South Carolina to California – leads to a 13% decrease in spending on visible goods.

This suggests why emerging economies like Russia and China, despite their low average incomes, are such hot luxury markets today.

Conspicuous consumption, then, is not a universal phenomenon. It’s a development phase that declines as countries, regions, or distinct groups get richer.

In The Middle-Class Millionaire, Russ Alan Prince and Lewis Schiff analyzed the spending habits of the 8.4 million American households whose wealth is self-made and whose net worth, including their home equity, is between $1 million and $10 million. Aside from a penchant for fancy cars, these millionaires devote their luxury dollars mostly to goods and services outsiders can’t see: concierge health care, home renovations, all sorts of personal coaches, and expensive family vacations.

“Inconspicuous Consumption,” by Virginia Postrel

Justin Wolfers and Betsey Stevenson analyzed all the major post-war happiness studies data (.pdf file here), including new data from the Gallup World Poll, which contains detailed data on subjective well-being for 132 countries in 2006. Contrary to previous researchers using less complete date, they found that: 1) Rich people are happier than poor people. 2) Richer countries are happier than poorer countries. 3) As countries get richer, they tend to get happier.

The following chart takes the average levels of satisfaction reported on the Gallup Poll’s 0-10 scale, and plots it against G.D.P. per capita (note the log scale):

The correlation between average levels of happiness and average incomes is very high — greater than 0.8.

The relationship between happiness and log income appears nearly linear. Thus, a 10% rise in income in a rich country like the USA appears to increase happiness by about as much as a 10% rise in income in Burundi — in fact, the slope appears to get steeper above $15K!

A 10% rise in income in Burundi requires one-sixtieth as much income as a 10% rise in income in the USA. Thus, even if the slope is three times as steep for rich countries as poor countries (as Wolfers & Stevenson estimate), this still means than an extra $100 has about a twenty-times-greater effect on happiness in Burundi.

“The Economics of Happiness, Part 1 & Part 2,” by Justin Wolfers

Robert J. Barro and Rachel M. McCleary (”Religion and Economic Growth Across Countries” & “Religion and Political Economy in an International Panel“) researched the relationship between religion and development.

Their cross-country analysis shows that per capita gdp has a significantly negative effect on religion, both in terms of beliefs and participation. This tendency is gradual as countries grow richer. A steady pattern of secularization has only applied to a few countries, such as Britain, France, and Germany.

For a given level of religious participation, increases in core religious beliefs — notably belief in hell, heaven, and an afterlife — tend to increase economic growth. In contrast, for given religious beliefs, increases in church attendance tend to reduce economic growth. In other words, the main growth effect is a positive response to an increase in believing relative to belonging (attending).

A certain amount of participation in religious activities is positive, in that people acquire useful beliefs. But if people spend too much time in religious activities, there is a negative effect on economic growth.

Religious participation is correlated with a lower probability of substance abuse, juvenile delinquency (Michael J. Donahue and Peter L. Benson, “Religion and the Well-Being of Adolescents“),  and depression (”Immigrant Generation, Assimilation and Adolescent Psychological Well-being“), and positive attitudes toward marriage and having children (Elaine Marchena and Linda J. Waite, “Re-assessing Family Goals and Attitudes in Late Adolescence”).

Overall, urbanization has a negative effect on religiosity, particularly in terms of participation.

“Religion and Economic Development,” by Rachel M. McCleary

According to “Marketing actions can modulate neural representations of experienced pleasantness,” by Antonio Rangel, Hilke Plassmann, & Baba Shiv, if people are told a wine is expensive while they are drinking it, they think it tastes nicer than a cheap one.

The researchers used fmri (functional magnetic-resonance imaging) to scan the brains of 20 volunteers while giving them sips of wine.

Dr Rangel gave his volunteers sips of what he said were 5 different wines made from cabernet sauvignon grapes, priced at between $5 and $90 a bottle. He told each of them the price of the wine in question as he did so. But he lied. He actually used only 3 wines, and served two of them twice at different prices.

The scanner showed that the activity of the medial orbitofrontal cortices (an area of the brain responsible for registering pleasant experiences) of the volunteers increased in line with the stated price of the wine. When one of the wines was said to cost $10 a bottle it was rated less than half as good as when people were told it cost $90 a bottle, its true retail price. When the team carried out a follow-up blind tasting without price information they got different results. The volunteers reported differences between the three “real” wines but not between the same wines when served twice.

Nor was the effect confined to everyday drinkers. When Dr Rangel repeated the experiment on members of the Stanford University wine club he got similar results.

This research suggests that a successful marketing campaign can not only make people more interested in a product, but also make them enjoy it more.

“Hitting the spot,” The Economist

Givers are happier people than non-givers. According to the Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey, a survey of 30,000 American households, people who gave money to charity in 2000 were 43% more likely than non-givers to say they were “very happy” about their lives.

Similarly, volunteers were 42% more likely to be very happy than non-volunteers. It didn’t matter whether gifts of money and time went to churches or symphony orchestras — givers to all types of religious and secular causes were far happier than non-givers.

According to the University of Michigan’s Panel Study of Income Dynamics, people who gave money away in 2001 were 34% less likely than non-givers to say that they had felt “so sad that nothing could cheer them up” in the past month. They were also 68% less likely to have felt “hopeless,” and 24% less likely to have said that “everything was an effort.”

15% of Americans donate blood at least once each year.

According to the National Opinion Research Center’s General Social Survey, in 2002, 43% of the American adults who gave blood 2 to 3 times during the year said they were very happy versus only 29% of those who did not give blood.

Researchers have conducted experiments in which people are queried about their happiness before and after — sometimes long after — they participate in a charitable activity, such as volunteering to help children or serving meals to the poor. The result: giving has a causal impact on happiness.

In one 1998 experiment at Duke University, adults were asked to give massages to babies — the idea being that giving a baby pleasure is a compassionate act with no expectation of a reward, even a “thank you” — in return. After they performed the massages, the seniors were found to have dramatically lower levels of the stress hormones cortisol, epinephrine, and norepinephrine in their brains.

“Why Giving Makes You Happy,” by Arthur Brooks

Place a rat in a cage with an electrified floor and subject it to repeated shocks; it will show many signs of stress, at first flinging itself against the walls with each shock. But after a while, it just sits there apathetically, showing no inclination to escape from its painful prison. When autopsied, it will be found to have oversized adrenal glands and, frequently, stomach ulcers, both indicating serious stress.

Now repeat the experiment, but with a wooden stick in the cage alongside the rat. When shocked, the rat chews on the stick, and as a result, it can endure its experience much longer without burnout. At autopsy, its adrenal glands are smaller, stomach ulcers fewer.

Put 2 rats in the electrified cage. Shock them both. They snarl and fight. At autopsy, their adrenal glands are normal, and, even though they have experienced numerous shocks, they have no ulcers.

Recently physiologists have uncovered the hormonal basis for such behavior. Animals and people subjected to attack or threat experience “subordination stress,” as a result of which their adrenal hormones go up, along with blood pressure and the probability of developing ulcers. But when given the opportunity to “take it out” on someone else, victims show no sign of stress.

“The Targets of Aggression,” by David P. Barash

In transcranial magnetic stimulation (”TMS”), a coil of wire is placed near the head. Alternating current flowing through the coil induces a magnetic field with a strength of up to 2.5 teslas (one tesla is 20,000 times the strength of the earth’s magnetic field). The field passes harmlessly through the skull and influences the electrical signals passing among neurons in the brain.

Physicians hold the coil close to whichever brain region they are interested in stimulating. In repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS), the current is switched on and off from one to 100 times a minute, which creates a series of magnetic impulses. A low frequency will block neural activity, yet higher frequencies will stimulate it. The latter appears to alleviate depression.

Subjects sometimes describe as a slight pull on the scalp. Mild headaches are common side effects. A few patients have had seizures.

Molecular studies by Armand Hausmann suggest that TMS stimulates neuronal factors that are known to aid in cell growth.

When Alvaro Pascual-Leone directed a coil at the language center of his participants, they suddenly could not utter a single word. After 5 half-hour treatment cycles by Peter Eichhammer, some tinnitus sufferers reported a substantial decrease in background noise, which for a few individuals lasted up to 6 months.

Babies are born with distinctive characteristics that make certain developmental outcomes more likely. Parental behavior is, in part, a reaction to the child’s behavior (See “Parent, child, and reciprocal influences,” and “How people make their own environments“) and physical appearance (”Infant attractiveness predicts maternal behaviors and attitudes“). Every published report of a correlation between parental behavior and child outcome now contains a disclaimer admitting that the direction of effects is uncertain and that the correlation could be due in part to a child-to-parent effect (The Nurture Assumption, p. 27), a type of evocative gene–environment correlation.

Children share 50% of their genes with each of their biological parents, which means that for genetic reasons alone, children born with a predisposition to be timid (Galen’s Prophecy) are more likely to be raised by timid parents, and children born with a predisposition to be aggressive are more likely to be reared by aggressive parents.

Genetic influences can produce change as well as stability. An individual may have blond hair at age 5, brown hair at age 25, and no hair at age 75, and these changes are ordained by the genes. As we get older we become more like our parents because our parents, too, went through these changes. Longitudinal studies using genetically informative designs (”Genetic change and continuity from fourteen to twenty months“) have shown that genetic influences that affect behavior or adjustment at one age are not necessarily the same genetic influences that affect these variables at another age. There are genes that kick in early and genes that bide their time.

The outcome of many years of research on parent-training interventions by Rex Forehand: Parents found the training to be effective in improving their children’s behavior at home but not at school. Similar conclusions have been reached in regard to programs designed to improve the school adjustment and academic performance of children living in poverty: There is little evidence that parenting programs produce the hoped-for linkage between changed parent behaviors and improved child outcomes (”Does research support claims about the benefits of involving parents in early intervention programs?“).

Behavioral genetic studies estimate genetic and environmental influences on developmental outcomes by measuring pairs of siblings. The results of these studies are monotonously consistent, regardless of the outcome measure used and the kinds of sibling pairs who participate — twins or ordinary siblings, reared together or apart, biologically related or not. Genetic effects generally account for 35% to 65% of the variance among the participants, the effects of being reared in the same home account for 0 to 10%, and the balance remains unaccounted for (”Where is the child’s environment?“). With few exceptions, being reared in the same home does not make siblings of any kind more alike.

These results show not only that siblings are different but that the home environment has had little or no net effect on the measured outcomes. If being reared by conscientious parents, for example, tended to make children more conscientious, then 2 children reared by conscientious parents should, on average, both be more conscientious than 2 reared by careless parents. Therefore, 2 children reared in the same home should be significantly more alike in conscientiousness than 2 reared in different homes, which is exactly what the studies do not find (”Genes, environment, and personality“). The same results also rule out the possibility that being reared by conscientious parents makes children less conscientious on average. The bottom-line effect of the shared home environment on conscientiousness is not noticeably different from zero.

For alcoholism (”The behavioral genetics of alcoholism“) and criminal behavior, the evidence strongly suggests that the operative environmental influences are in the neighborhood, not in the home.

A major study was launched in 1987; its results are described in The Relationship Code. David Reiss studied 720 pairs of same-sex adolescent siblings (identical and fraternal twins and full, half and stepsiblings) over a 3-year period, from early to mid-adolescence. The adolescents’ behavior and adjustment, and the behavior of their parents, were judged by observers, the parents, and the adolescents themselves; these multiple sources of information were combined to produce measures of unusual reliability.

Virtually all correlations between parental behaviors and child outcomes were accounted for by genetic factors. The parents treated their children differently but they were reacting to genetic differences among the children, rather than causing the differences. The environment not shared by siblings was by far the largest (in many cases, the sole) nongenetic contributor to the adolescents’ behavior and adjustment, and the study eliminated all of the following as possible sources of nonshared environmental influence: “differential marital conflict about the adolescent versus the sib, differential parenting toward siblings, and asymmetrical relationships the sibs construct with each other.” Ruling out the last factor indicates that differences in age — that is, birth order — cannot account for the differences between siblings.

Developmentalists and behavioral geneticists alike have so far been unable to identify the important environmental influences on development, the sources of the nongenetic variation in personality and behavior.

Birth order effects are real, but they are tied to the context of the family. We ordinarily know the birth order only of people we are close to, and these are the people we are most likely to see with their parents and siblings. Birth order studies in which parents are asked to rate their children’s personalities, or adults are asked to compare themselves with their siblings, generally do yield significant birth order effects; studies that use other methods generally do not (”Context-specific learning, personality, and birth order“). In a study in which pairs of siblings were rated both by parents and by teachers, parents judged the older sibling to be more aggressive than the younger one, but teachers judged them to be about the same (”An adoption study of the etiology of teacher and parent reports of externalizing behavior problems in middle childhood“).

Family misfortunes have repercussions on children’s lives outside the home. A divorce, for example, often involves moving to a different residence, and moving disrupts the child’s life outside the family. Even when other demographic differences are controlled, children who have experienced frequent residential moves have higher rates of social, behavioral, and academic problems (”Mobility as a mediator of the effects of child maltreatment on academic performance” & “Impact of family relocation on children’s growth, development, school function, and behavior“). McLanahan and Sandefur (Growing up with a Single Parent) found that controlling for 2 factors — number of residential moves and differences in family income — can erase most of the differences in outcome between children reared in single-parent and two-parent families.

Because developed societies require very different behaviors in the home and in public (”Growing up in the post-modern age”), and people everywhere make distinctions between kin and nonkin (How the Mind Works), children behave differently in different contexts (”Studying temperament via construction of the Toddler Behavior Assessment Questionnaire“).

Children bring with them to adulthood the language and accent of their peers, not those of their parents. Evidence comes from studies of hearing children reared by deaf parents and of deaf children reared by hearing parents and from studies of the children of immigrants.

Derek Bickerton interviewed adults whose parents had immigrated to Hawaii around the turn of the last century. Though the parents came from all over the world and spoke a variety of languages, their adult offspring all spoke the same language — a creole, created in their childhood peer groups. No trace of their parents’ language or accent was detectable in their speech; the language of their peers had become their “native language.” The adults in these communities used a pidgin, not the creole, to communicate with each other.

Simon Baron-Cohen (”Do children with autism acquire the phonology of their peers?”) studied the accents of children and young adults with autism. These were the offspring of immigrants; their mothers spoke English with a foreign accent. The nonautistic siblings of these children spoke English without a foreign accent, but 83% of the children and young adults with autism had retained the foreign accent of their mothers. Baron-Cohen attributed this outcome to “a lack of the normal drive to identify with peers.”

Multivariate genetic analysis makes it possible to estimate how much genetic and environmental influences each contribute to the correlations found between behavior in different contexts. For example, children who are shy in one social context are not necessarily shy in others, but some children are shy in every context (”The Consistency and Concomitants of Inhibition“). Multivariate genetic analysis shows that the genetic component of shyness is responsible for the correlation across contexts; differences in shyness from one context to another are due primarily to environmental influences (”Continuity and change in infant shyness from 14 to 20 months“).

Interventions designed to teach parents better ways of dealing with their noncompliant children succeed in reducing the children’s coercive behavior at home but do not produce significant improvements in their behavior in school.

Infants who behave in a somber, subdued fashion in the presence of their depressed mothers behave normally in the presence of nondepressed caregivers; their subdued behavior is “specific to their interactions with their depressed mothers” (”Infants of depressed mothers show less ‘depressed’ behavior with their nursery teachers”). Secure attachments to one caregiver are not good predictors of secure attachments to another (”Prediction of infant-father and infant-mother attachment” & “Quality of infants’ attachments to professional caregivers“). Nor are secure attachments to parents good predictors of successful relationships with peers (”Maternal, teacher, and child care history correlates of children’s relationships with peers“). The quality of sibling relationships does not predict the quality of relationships with peers; sometimes the correlations are negative (”Compensatory patterns of support among children’s peer relationships“).

According to Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt (Human Ethology), once children in hunter–gatherer and tribal societies have been weaned, they spend most of their time in the local play group. “Thus the child’s socialization occurs mainly within the play group.”

When children divide or are divided into two groups, preexisting differences between the groups are widened by contrast effects between groups and assimilation within them.

Thus, putting antisocial youth together for a group intervention is likely to make them more antisocial, a prediction that has recently been confirmed by Thomas J. Dishion (”When interventions harm”).

A boy’s status in his peer group is determined in part by his size. Small, slow-maturing boys generally have lower status (”An ethological study of dominance formation and maintenance in a group of human adolescents“). Studies have shown that children who are small for their age tend to have more than their share of psychological problems (”Academic and emotional difficulties associated with short stature”).

M.C. Jones (”The later careers of boys who were early or late maturing,” 1957) did a longitudinal study comparing males who were slow developers — smaller than most of their peers throughout childhood — with early developers. The two groups ended up almost equal in mean adult height, but there were significant differences in their adult personalities. The early developers were more dominant, relaxed, and poised; the slow developers were more impulsive, attention-seeking, and touchy.

“Socialization, Personality Development, and the Child’s Environments,” by Judith Rich Harris

Steve Cole and John Cacioppo, used a “gene chip” to look at the DNA of isolated people and found that people who described themselves as chronically lonely have distinct patterns of genetic activity, almost all of it involving the immune system.

The study does not show which came first — the loneliness or the physical traits.

Many studies of large populations have shown that people who describe themselves as lonely or as having little social support are more likely to die prematurely and to have infections, high blood pressure, insomnia and cancer.

When the researchers studied and compared all 22,000 human genes, 209 stood out in the loneliest people.

Many of the these genes seemed to be involved in the basic immune response to tissue damage and others were involved in the production of antibodies (the tag the body uses to mark microbes or damaged cells for removal), suggesting that the loneliest people had unhealthy levels of chronic inflammation, which has been associated with heart and artery disease, arthritis, Alzheimer’s, etc.

“Sick? Lonely? Genes tell the tale,” Reuters

A recent study by Amanda Rose found that teenage girls who vented to each other about their problems were more likely to develop depression and anxiety.

(Rose found that guys don’t tend to analyze their problems as deeply as women. That might be because relationship issues tend to spark the most obsessive discussions, and that’s a subject women are more likely to dwell on.)

Girls who vented to each other reported feeling closer to their friends.

“Quit complaining — it may make you feel worse,” by Melissa Dahl