Social Science posts
- March 13, 2010
- 11:06 AM
- 15 views
The evidence is: status, communication training, and intrinsic rewards are positively associated with scientists communicating with the media
by Christina Pikas in Christina's LIS Rant
Myths abound about how scientists do not talk with the media or communicate with the public and if they do so, it is only because they are required to by funders' "broader impact" requirements. The evidence, however, does not support this view. This article is another in a series of communications based on a multi-national study of how scientists in several fields communicate with the media. (you might have seen [1] or [2]). This article only uses data from US scientists who were recently corresponding authors on peer reviewed articles in stem cell research and epidemiology (survey sent to 1,254 with a response rate of 34.5% for n=363). Refer to the article for detailed description of their research questions, statistical methods, and significance. Two-thirds of the scientists had interacted with the media in the previous 3 years. More than a quarter interacted with the media six or more times. Status - career level and number of publications - was positively associated with a greater number of media contacts. Respondents who were confident in their ability to interact with the media and those who participated in formal communication training were more likely to interact with the media. The authors found that extrinsic rewards - like funder/sponsor and their own reputations - were not statistically significantly associated with frequency of interaction with the media. Intrinsic rewards - the scientists enjoyed communicating - were associated with more frequent interactions. Citation Dunwoody, S., Brossard, D., & Dudo, A. (2009). Socialization or rewards? Predicting U.S. scientist-media interactions Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, 86 (2), 299-314. Retrieved March 13, 2010 from http://aejmc.org/topics/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/3-Dunwoody-et-al.pdf. [1] Peters, H. P., Brossard, D., de Cheveigné, S., Dunwoody, S., Kallfass, M., Miller, S., & Tsuchida, S. (2008). Science communication: Interactions with the mass media. Science, 321(5886), 204-205. doi:10.1126/science.1157780 [2] Scheufele, D. A., Brossard, D., Dunwoody, S., Corley, E. A., Guston, D., & Peters, H. P. (2009, August 4). Are scientists really out of touch? The Scientist, Retrieved from http://www.the-scientist.com/templates/trackable/display/news.jsp?type=news&o_url=news/display/55875&id=55875 Read the comments on this post...... Read more »
Dunwoody, S., Brossard, D., . (2009) Socialization or rewards? Predicting U.S. scientist-media interactions. Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, 86(2), 299-314. info:/
- March 12, 2010
- 05:55 PM
- 34 views
Can going to church change your views of god?
Christians don't agree on the nature of their god. Their different ideas are many and varied, but one broad way of looking at it is that they tend to believe either in a personal god (one who takes an active, day-to-day interest in people's lives and also intervenes), or an impersonal, distant god (the sort of god who lights the blue touch paper at the moment of creation and then retires to a safe distance).So who believes in what kind of god? Well, that's the topic of a recent paper by Scott Schieman at the University of Toronto (I was going to post on an anxiety study today, but Schieman's paper has recently hit the newswires, and the reports miss what's really the central point of his study).We already know that poor people, the poorly educated, African-Americans, and women - i.e. people with low social status - tend to prefer an active, personal god. That's not too surprising.What Schieman wanted to know was whether belief in a personal god was linked to religious activities. He found that it was, and in an intriguing way.He took data from the Baylor religion survey, and compared individual's socio-economic status (a combination of income and education) and compared it with beliefs in divine involvement and divine control. He did that by creating a statistical model derived from the data, and you can see one of the outputs from that model in this figure.The figure shows how belief in divine involvement varies with socioeconomic status for three different groups: people who go to church weekly, those who go several times a year, and those who never go to church.Look first at the right-hand side of the graph (where the rich people are). It shows what you might expect: people who go Church every week tend to believe in divine involvement, but people who never go to church are less likely to (but they still score fairly high).Now look at people with low status, on the left. All of them have high levels of beliefs in divine involvement - even if they don't go to Church!The effect of that is that, among people who go to church weekly, levels of belief in divine involvement stay high as you move up the socio-economic scale. For people who never go to Church, these beliefs drop away as you progress upwards.Schieman interprets this as evidence that going to church regularly can reinforce belief in divine involvement:My observations ... [contest] the view that SES is uniformly associated with lower levels of belief in divine involvement and control. The finding that high SES individuals tend to report similar levels of divine involvement and control as their low SES peers—when they share high levels of religious involvement—challenges the assertion that higher SES contributes to “demythologized beliefs” processes. In contrast, the results are more consistent with the view that exposure to messages and lessons in religious activities reinforces systems of “religious explanations”— especially doctrine about God’s involvement and causal relevance in everyday life.What he's saying is that the reason high status people don't believe in a personal god is not because their education and wealth persuade them that such beliefs are wrong, but rather because they stop going to church. And when they stop going to church, their beliefs in a personal god are no longer reinforced.He does also acknowledge that causality can work in the other direction (high status people who don't believe in a personal god don't go to church). However, after pondering this one quite a bit, I suspect he's on to something.After all, there are lots of reasons for a low status person to believe in a personal god, even if they don't go to church. That's fairly uncontroversial.But you can well imagine that a high status person might have reasons to go to church, even if they don't believe in a personal god. And yet, those that do go to church regularly do actually believe in a personal god.Could it be that repeated exposure to an environment that promotes a particular ideology actually influences your beliefs, despite all the external factors that work to undermine them? It wouldn't be the first time that had happened!Schieman, S. (2010). Socioeconomic Status and Beliefs about God's Influence in Everyday Life Sociology of Religion, 71 (1), 25-51 DOI: 10.1093/socrel/srq004 This article by Tom Rees was first published on Epiphenom. It is licensed under Creative Commons.
... Read more »
Schieman, S. (2010) Socioeconomic Status and Beliefs about God's Influence in Everyday Life. Sociology of Religion, 71(1), 25-51. DOI: 10.1093/socrel/srq004
- March 12, 2010
- 03:40 PM
- 18 views
Explain your total sheep played
by Simon Halliday in Amanuensis
When you come across a line like this in a paper, you can't help but laugh, "We now discuss and explain the cumulative number of sheep played in all rounds of the game." Yes, subjects played sheep. You may wonder how. I shall attempt to explain.In three papers based on work in South Africa and Namibia, Bjørn Vollan and, in one paper, his co-author Bernd Hayo investigate several different experiments with the Nama people. They ran trust games, trust games with third party punishment, and common pool resource games with groups of villagers in the Northern Cape Province of South Africa and the southern region of Namibia. Their work was supported by BIOTA, a biodiversity and conservation project.So what kinds of things did they find out? And how on earth were sheep involved? Well, the Nama people spend substantial amounts of time on subsistence herding of goats and sheep. Consequently, when they played the common pool resource game, the game was framed as though the subjects were exploiting common grazing ground by choosing a number of 'sheep' to 'graze' the resource. The game works like a multi-player prisoner's dilemma where the self-interested thing for a subject to do is to 'defect' by having as many sheep as possible in the hope that no one else will choose lots of sheep, but everyone chooses lots of sheep. The social optimum occurs when people exercise self-restraint and jointly have several sheep, but not too many such that the common resource vanishes. Strangely enough, people often don't play completely self-interestedly, instead they choose something in between the individual optimum and the social optimum (see Cardenas and Carpenter, 2008 and Velez et al, 2006). In Bjørn Vollan's work, we see that the Nama also cooperate to some extent with the option to exploit the resource, and, after several rounds, they also are able to vote on adopting a self-regulating policy of punishment, reward or communication, any of which seem to result in a higher degree of cooperation. The experiments were run with groups of five. In the control, when the subjects were given the choice of between 10 and 90 sheep(in tens), 51.6% of people chose the less cooperative options of 60-90 sheep. When, in the latter rounds, a treatment for reward, punishment, or communication, could be voted on the amount of outright defection decreased to 30.7% of the sample, with 46.5% of the sample choosing the highly cooperative 10, 20 or 30 sheep (everyone choosing 20 would be the social optimum).So we know that introducing some kind of voted rule works, but does any one rule work better? Does 'buy-in' matter? One problems is that the rankings were different in South Africa and Namibia. In the South African community, punishment resulted in lower numbers of sheep chosen with the choice stabilising at around 4 sheep on average; it worked best of all when more people in the group participating in the experiment voted for it. So a community with 'buy-in' to norms could operate more effectively (interesting enough, in the Hayo and Vollan paper there's a strong correlation between voting for punishment and being a Lutheran, one of the few religious affiliation effects they found in the subjects' behavior). Conversely, in Namibia rewards work much better, though the positive effect of decreasing the number of sheep chosen peter off. Vollan argues that this can be explained by rewards 'crowding out' intrinsic motivations to cooperate (read his paper for the full argument).So, we know what's happened in the CPR game, but what about the trust game and the trust game with third party punishment? Recall that the trust game is a bargain between two subjects: a Trustor and a Trustee. The Trustor chooses some fraction of an endowment to give to the Trustee, the total amount of which is multipled by 3 (this act is called 'trust' below). The Trustee may then send an amount back to the Trustor. In the third party punishment (TPP) variation, a Third Party is introduced with the power to 'punish' the other players: the Third Party can pay to reduce the payoffs of players whose behavior she did not like, either the Trustor, the Trustee or both. In Vollan's results, and moving from sheep to money, we see that South African Nama trust 20% of their endowment to their partner, whereas Namibian Nama trust 40% of their endowment to their partner. The South African group is at the bottom end of all results of trust games internationally (see Cardenas and Carpenter, 2008, Camerer, 2003). Then, in the second set of experiments examing trust, punishment and relatedness, Vollan finds the results presented in the table below.The paper presents the aggregated results and I could not dis-aggregate them for South Africa and Namibia as in Vollan's other paper. Nevertheless, the results are instructive. We can see, first, that there are substantially different results between villagers, friends and family. Moreover, introducing punishment substantially increases the likelihood that subjects act 'trustingly' (send money to the Trustee) and 'trustworthily' (send money back to the Trustor). But the effect of punishment differs greatly: villagers behave 48.4% more trustingly, friends behave 44.2% more trustingly, and family only 21.9% more trustingly. The relationship is different for trustworthiness: friends come out on top, behaving 65% more trustworthily, villagers 50% more trustworthily, and family 37% more trustworthily. Obviously these rankings occur because family members behave the most trustingly and trustworthily from the outset, but it goes to show that third party punishment may be its most effective between non-relatives in promoting trusting and trustworthy behavior.The papers are all fascinating, particularly for a South African interested in doing similar work. I hope that the few results I have shown might have piqued your interest enough for you to go and read the papers. I presented what I perceived as the most interesting results without critiquing Vollan's methods too much. That said, Vollan could have done one or two things to improve his methods. For example, and somewhat pettily, with translation into Afrikaans (the language in which the experiments were conducted), Vollan should have translated and back-translated for consistency. Also, we could be given some additional ethnographic information about the Nama's particular institutional structures of third party punishment, though Vollan does provide information about reciprocity, gift-giving, and trusting/trustworthy behavior. He also finds (2008, 16) that the subject display inequity aversion, so I'd think that given the prevalence literature on this topic it would be worth investigating this idea more and offering some insights in the conclusion after the later results. Overall, they're a good contribution to the experimental economics, resource economics and behavioral economics literature and I thoroughly enjoyed reading them.ReferencesHayo, Bernd & Bjørn Vollan. 2009. "Individual Heterogeneity, Group Interaction, and Co-operative Behaviour: Evidence from a Common-Pool Resource Experiment in South Africa and Namibia." Philipps-Universitt Marburg, Faculty of Business Administration and Economics, Department of Economics (Volkswirtschaftliche Abteilung).Vollan, Bjørn. 2008a. "Kinship and friendship in a trust game with third party punishment." Philipps-Universitt Marburg, Faculty of Business Administration and Economics, Department of Economics (Volkswirtschaftliche Abteilung).... Read more »
Vollan, B. (2008) Socio-ecological explanations for crowding-out effects from economic field experiments in southern Africa. Ecological Economics, 67(4), 560-573. DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2008.01.015
- March 12, 2010
- 09:50 AM
- 27 views
Obstinately Overprotecting Odin
by Katie Hill in Promega Connections
I woke up this morning and worried about my 2 year-old son, Odin. Is he eating enough leafy greens? Is he socializing well with others? Is this demanding and snarky attitude he is newly exhibiting a permanent part of his personality? Will ramming his head into the table while playing soccer in the house prevent [...]... Read more »
Narita, K., Takei, Y., Suda, M., Aoyama, Y., Uehara, T., Kosaka, H., Amanuma, M., Fukuda, M., & Mikuni, M. (2010) Relationship of parental bonding styles with gray matter volume of dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in young adults. Progress in Neuro-Psychopharmacology and Biological Psychiatry. DOI: 10.1016/j.pnpbp.2010.02.025
- March 12, 2010
- 05:13 AM
- 13 views
The Green Evolution that preceded the Green Revolution
by Jeremy in Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
The standard litany against the Green Revolution is that it failed to banish hunger because the technologies it ushered in were no use to small peasant farmers. Farmers with access to cash and good land did well, but poorer farmers on marginal land got nothing out of the revolution, and if they did somehow [...]... Read more »
Harwood, J. (2009) Peasant Friendly Plant Breeding and the Early Years of the Green Revolution in Mexico. Agricultural History, 83(3), 384-410. DOI: 10.3098/ah.2009.83.3.384
- March 11, 2010
- 08:16 PM
- 22 views
Watch This Space
by Roberta Kwok in Journal Watch Online
Small cities gobble large amounts of land per person
... Read more »
McDonald, R., Forman, R., & Kareiva, P. (2010) Open Space Loss and Land Inequality in United States' Cities, 1990–2000. PLoS ONE, 5(3). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0009509
- March 11, 2010
- 11:00 AM
- 37 views
Coca-Cola and Water Use in India: "Good Till the Last Drop"
by Eric Michael Johnson in The Primate Diaries
Coca-Cola sucks India dry. Image: Carlos Latuff / Wikimedia CommonsThe marketing executive who came up with Coca-Cola's popular slogan in 1908 most likely never expected it would be taken so literally. However, a hundred years ago there probably weren't many who imagined a term like "water wars" could exist in a region that experiences annual monsoons.
On February 25 a complaint was filed in the New York Supreme Court against the The Coca-Cola Company alleging that they knew about and sought to cover up human rights abuses in Guatemala. While that trial gets started, the company's controversial practices in India continue involving the over-exploitation of limited water resources and the contamination of groundwater supplies. In response to public outcry the soft drink company is now championing itself as a longtime environmental leader and the business community is eager to advertise their claim. Yesterday CNN Money reported that:
Coke has been a leader when it comes to environmental issues: It is aiming to be water neutral -- meaning every drop of water used by the company will be replenished -- by 2020.
This would come as a surprise to the Plachimada community in the State of Kerala. Ever since Coca-Cola opened a bottling plant on their land in 2000 they have been faced with chronic drought and polluted water. In 2006 these residents of a small impoverished community in southern India began a pitched campaign to evict Coca-Cola from their land which led to fierce battles with local authorities. Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...... Read more »
AIYER, A. (2007) THE ALLURE OF THE TRANSNATIONAL: Notes on Some Aspects of the Political Economy of Water in India. Cultural Anthropology, 22(4), 640-658. DOI: 10.1525/can.2007.22.4.640
- March 11, 2010
- 09:51 AM
- 41 views
The Origins of Sexual Prejudice
by Ultimo167 in Strong Silent Types
Mata et al. (2009) use social dominance orientation (SDO) theory to ponder why it is that boys in school are so prejudiced against gays. Might contact, understanding, and respect lead to more inclusive (and less homophobic) classroom settings?... Read more »
Mata, J., Ghavami, N., & Wittig, M. (2009) Understanding Gender Differences in Early Adolescents' Sexual Prejudice. The Journal of Early Adolescence, 30(1), 50-75. DOI: 10.1177/0272431609350925
Martin, C., & Ruble, D. (2010) Patterns of Gender Development. Annual Review of Psychology, 61(1), 353-381. DOI: 10.1146/annurev.psych.093008.100511
- March 11, 2010
- 09:37 AM
- 19 views
Trusting and Bargaining in Africa
by Simon Halliday in Amanuensis
Are we Africans different to the rest of the world in our giving, punishing and trusting behaviour? Three remarkable economic anthropology studies try to examine this kind of question with several ethnic groups in four countries: the Pimbwe, Sukuma and Kahama in Tanzania, the Maasai of Kenya and the Ju/'hoan Bushmen of Namibia and Botswana. I can't to do any of the papers justice with my short comments, but I thought you might find them interesting nevertheless.The three papers take quite different approaches in their use of economic experiments. Paciotti and Hadley's paper with the Pimbwe and Sukuma looks at the institutional scope of interactions, that is the extent to which cultural practices and norms may imply differences in the ways people play. They show that the two ethnic groups live differently and respond dramatically differently in the experiments. The Sukuma are agro-pastoralists with pre-existing norms of within and between village cooperation, and justice institutions (sungusungu) that punish individuals for norm infringement. Their play in the ultimatum game was more generous than the Pimbwe, with very few rejections (most likely because the offers were fair or hyper-fair). Contrastingly, the Pimbwe do not have many institutions for between village cooperation, or any third party justice institutions and their grievances are often settled with personal violence. Their results are consequently unsurprising - much lower offers on average, with substantially lower offers to those of another village. The remarkable thing here is that even the Sukuma's offers to residents of another village were higher than the Pimbwe's offers to residents in their own village. Also, the Pimbwe rejected offers (which some call punishment) substantially more than the Sukuma. The authors therefore show that even within small geographical distances, differences in institutional backgrounds alter how people behave.Lee Cronk's study of the Maasai cultural norm of osotua fascinated me even more. Osotua is an often reciprocal relationship between male Maasai who call each other isotuatin. Osotua bonds isotuatin to each other so that they should provide for each other in times of great need, normally requiring assistance with food or gifts of livestock, or even revenge killing. So Cronk decided to see how Maasai subjects played the trust game in two settings: the first without any cultural frame, and the second where it was framed as 'an osotua game'. As you'd expect they played the game quite differently given the frame. In the control (no frame) and considering all transfers the subjects gave 35.3% vs. 28.2% in the framed condition. Considering player 1 (the 'trustor'), the transfers differ 38% (unframed) and 30.8% (unframed), though not statistically significantly so, and transfers by player 2 (the 'trustee') back to player 1 also differ: 32.5% (unframed) vs 25.5% (framed). But only in the framed condition did a strong correlation existed between the amounts given and the amounts returned show through, indicating the reciprocal nature of the osotua. Also, Cronk proposes, the lower amounts given in the osotua frame probably reflect the sense that osotua gifts are only given to assuage great need, and normally are not great amounts. Cronk argues forcibly that anthropologists and economists need to act carefully when they construct games within specific tribal and ethnographic contexts, investigating the norms that exist within a specific context, and ensuring that they tailor their studies accordingly, being careful of when they encounter norms that may alter the data that they find.Finally, Polly Wiessner's research into the Ju/'hoan bushmen looked at their behavior in the dictator game and the ultimatum game, after which Wiessner examined their behavior in everyday life to see whether experimental behavior and behavior outside the experiment were consistent. In the dictator game, the average offer was 20%, and in the ultimatum game the average offer was 16% with 4% refusals. These averages are the some of the lowest in the world (see Henrich et al, 2006, Barr et al 2009). Notwithstanding these low within game offers, outside the game the Ju/'hoansi share tobacco, pool food resources, ostracize those who had infringed social norms (those they ostracized possibly stole a goat) and act compassionately towards those who behaved unwisely with the money from the experiments (some went to the town, got drunk the so-called "fault of the beer"). As per experimental protocols, the subjects behavior was anonymous. Wiessner was asked repeatedly during the experiments if she was lying about this because the concept seemed quite foreign to the subjects whose behavior is normally socially embedded. Wiessner's work reinforces how researchers need to align laboratory and experimental protocols with the everyday lives of the people involved; though many of us are involved in anonymous market economies the distances that separate us from those who produce the goods we produce are immense, this is not always the case. Moreover, being able to understand the spillovers of anonymous behavior to social embedded behavior and the converse can enlighten the use of experiments in urban and rural, market-integrated and non-market-integrated societies.The papers serve as a reminder to economists (though how many economists read anthropology journals I do not know) that their work must take cognisance of cultural and institutional structures, of the frames that they introduce with experiments (think of harambee with Jean Ensminger's work), and of the parallelism between experimental behavior and behavior in parallel situations outside of the experiment. In this way, pairing laboratory experiments with field experiments and good ethnography could provide a better way to do things in future. Or so I hope. References:Cronk, Lee. 2007. "The Influence of Cultural Framing on play in the trust game: a Maasai example." Evolution and Human Behavior 28(5):352-358.Paciotti, Brian & Craig Hadley. 2003. "The Ultimatum Game in Southwestern Tanzania: Ethnic Variation and Institutional Scope." Current Anthropology 44(3):427-432.Wiessner, P. (2009). Experimental Games and Games of Life among the Ju/’hoan Bushmen Current Anthropology, 50 (1), 133-138 DOI: 10.1086/595622... Read more »
Wiessner, P. (2009) Experimental Games and Games of Life among the Ju/’hoan Bushmen. Current Anthropology, 50(1), 133-138. DOI: 10.1086/595622
- March 11, 2010
- 05:34 AM
- 93 views
"Why do we believe", and are atheists really more intelligent?
by Daniel in Ego sum Daniel
ResearchBlogging.org editor Dave Munger has written an article for SEED magazine entitled "Why do we believe". The article summarizes recent blog entries regarding studies on the origins of religiosity. It's really worth reading to get a good overview of the subject, and what do you know he links my entry on god's will and beliefs in it.
Among the studies that are mentioned is a controversial study entitled "Why Liberals and Atheists Are More Intelligent" (link at the end of this post).
Medical writer Tom Rees devotes his blog Epiphenom to the scientific study of religion. Last week he examined a study on the relationship between intelligence and religious belief. Published in Social Psychology Quarterly, this study by Satoshi Kanazawa replicated the results of several earlier studies in showing that strong religious belief was correlated with lower intelligence. In this case, adolescents who scored higher on intelligence tests were less likely to be religious as adults.
But Rees says Kanazawa’s study goes beyond those earlier studies to arrive at a potential explanation of why less-intelligent people are more religious: Intelligence evolved in order for people to adapt to novel situations.
You should go over to Epiphenom to read a summary of the study as well as my commentary on it, posted as a blog comment. In summary: I don't think it's very good. Kanazawa's evolutionary argument is completely based on some pretty wild conjectures and lacks any sort of empiric support. His argument is at most "sorta reasonable", but we must do better than that surely. For us real evolutionary researchers that have to spend considerable time and effort gathering a solid line of evidence, this sort of jumping to conclusions can be a tad annoying.
Also, let's remember what kind of forces we're dealing with here, how evolution through natural selection actually acts and what it acts on. Even if we assume first, that intelligence tests do measure some sort of good approximation of intelligence, and second, that results gathered today actually reflect a past situation; what difference do a "good few" average points make for survival? Any conclusions made from the correlation between higher intelligence, as measured by intelligence tests, and atheism are only significant within a larger evolutionary and functional neurobiological context. So take claims that atheists are more intelligent (on average) with a considerable pinch of salt.
Read more on the subject on Epiphenom, here and here.
Kanazawa, S. (2010). Why Liberals and Atheists Are More Intelligent Social Psychology Quarterly DOI: 10.1177/0190272510361602
Swedish blog tags: Vetenskap, Biologi, Neurovetenskap, Hjärnan, Religion
Technorati tags: Science, Biology, Neuroscience, Brain, Religion
... Read more »
Kanazawa, S. (2010) Why Liberals and Atheists Are More Intelligent. Social Psychology Quarterly. DOI: 10.1177/0190272510361602
- March 9, 2010
- 06:01 PM
- 30 views
Pyramidal thoughts
by Jan Husdal in Supply Chain Risk Research & Literature Review
A promising title with promising content? Perhaps. If you are a supply chain or logistics professional, looking for a paper that discusses the intricacies of managing a supply chain in a disaster area, how to prepare and how to recover, this is NOT it. However, if you are a supply chain or logistics academic or [ ... ]... Read more »
Jr, R. (2009) The supply chain crisis and disaster pyramid: A theoretical framework for understanding preparedness and recovery. International Journal of Physical Distribution , 39(7), 619-628. DOI: 10.1108/09600030910996288
- March 9, 2010
- 05:30 PM
- 40 views
Trust in the Face(width)
by Daniel Hawes in Ingenious Monkey | 20-two-5
It seems odd, but stable facial cues, such as the width-height ratio of a man's face, may be decent predictors of trustworthiness. Less strange is that we apparently use face-width when intuitively judging a strangers' trustworthiness...... Read more »
Stirrat, M., & Perrett, D. (2010) Valid Facial Cues to Cooperation and Trust: Male Facial Width and Trustworthiness. Psychological Science, 21(3), 349-354. DOI: 10.1177/0956797610362647
- March 9, 2010
- 04:39 PM
- 44 views
Darwin and Spencer in the Middle East
by Eric Michael Johnson in The Primate Diaries
It is a common argument by those who are opposed to evolution's implication for religious belief to label Darwin as a social Darwinist and a racist. Adrian Desmond and James Moore's book Darwin's Sacred Cause has gone a long way towards dispelling any claims that Darwin sought to justify black inferiority (in fact, as they show, it was just the opposite). However, the claim that Darwin inspired social Darwinism is a persistent argument and those that proffer it will stoop to any level in order to discredit him. As I pointed out in my series Deconstructing Social Darwinism, the political theory is incredibly inconsistent but the central tenets were formed by Herbert Spencer, not Darwin. Darwin himself largely eschewed politics and economics and felt that Spencer had misconstrued his ideas for his own political ends. However, despite how frequently this fact has been presented the erroneous argument continues to appear over and over again.
Religious fundamentalists such as Jonathan Wells or Harun Yahya (whose book blaming Darwin for Hitler, Stalin, Mao, hemorrhoids, long lines at Starbucks and other terrible evils can be seen in the image above) are well known for this line of thought. However, the latest attempt to label Darwin with this brush is Richard Weikart, an historian at California State University, Stanislaus in his article Was Darwin or Spencer the father of laissez-faire social Darwinism? in the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization.
Weikart's argument is very poorly constructed, as you would expect of someone who works for the Intelligent Design think tank The Discovery Institute and who wrote a book blaming Darwin for Hitler's ideas on eugenics and genocide (a book so powerfully argued that it took a single blog post to refute it). Rather than point out the poor scholarship in his own article I thought it would be more illuminating to look at a case study that offers a novel way of determining whose ideas were interpreted as social Darwinian and whose were viewed as neutral science. I recently discovered such a case study in the form of a PhD dissertation by an historian of Middle Eastern science Marwa Elshakry. Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...... Read more »
Elshakry, Marwa. (2003) Darwin's Legacy in the Arab East: Science, Religion and Politics, 1870-1914. Princeton University D.Phil. Thesis. info:/
- March 9, 2010
- 03:23 PM
- 29 views
Beyond Borders
by Roberta Kwok in Journal Watch Online
Rich countries import substantial carbon dioxide emissions
... Read more »
Davis, S.J., & K. Caldeira. (2010) Consumption-based accounting of CO2 emissions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. info:/10.1073/pnas.090674107
- March 9, 2010
- 09:04 AM
- 52 views
Sleep deprivation impairs emotion recognition
by William Lu in The Quantum Lobe Chronicles
The ability to read emotions is an important part of the human experience; the only way to successfully navigate through complex social environments. It comes in handy especially if you don the title of psychotherapist or professional poker player. Without it, you become socially inept. You enter the world of the autistic individual.Thanks to Charles Darwin we now know that it’s not just the eyes that are “the windows to the soul”. He first wrote about the subject of facial expressions in his 1898 book titled The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (the link includes the work in its entirety). In it he described the emotions conveyed in the face as being both universal and “species-specific”.Ekman and Friesen (1969) expounded on Darwin's theory, hypothesizing that universal facial expressions were to be found in the relationship between distinctive patterns of the facial muscles and particular emotions. In 1971 they traveled to Papua New Guinea to test the Fore tribe, a people who had minimal contact with outsiders. The researchers found that the Fore people were able to accurately identify the expressions of emotion in photographs of people from cultures with which they were not yet familiar (here's a link to a fascinating NPR Ekman podcast). An interesting, yet off-topic note: Apparently a Fore subgroup found in southern New Guinea regularly practiced cannibalism by dismembering and eating victims of the prion disease kuru (aka laughing sickness due to the outbursts of laughter during the second phase). Shirley Lindenbaum, a kuru researcher, reported that kuru victims were highly valued as a source of food because the layers of fat resembled pork...yum (Lindenbaum, 1979). Women would often feed brain and various parts of organs to their young and the elderly. Unfortunately, this was yet another mode of kuru transmission. The southern Fore knew better than to eat diseased corpses, but thought that kuru was more a mental affliction than a physical one.van der Helm and colleagues over at the University of California decided to take a unique look at emotional recognition in the context of sleep. In their recently published SLEEP paper, they asked whether emotional processing would become significantly impaired in sleep deprived individuals. The authors randomly assigned 37 young adults to either a sleep control or total sleep deprivation group. All participants abstained from caffeine and alcohol three days prior to and three days during the study (sucks to be them). Both groups were asked to perform an emotional facial recognition task at 16:00 for two consecutive days.The task involved evaluating sad, angry, and happy faces from the Ekman Pictures of facial affect set. The participants were presented with 10 emotionally morphed pictures of the same person and asked to determine which emotion each facial expression was conveying. The control group got to sleep at home like normal people while the not so fortunate sleep-deprivees were kept awake in the sleep lab (at least they had internet!).(similar morphing method used in the study)The team found that a single night of sleep deprivation significantly disrupted the ability to identify emotionally salient facial expressions in others. Deficits were most dramatic for emotions eliciting high autonomic arousal (i.e. happy and angry). Interestingly enough, they found that women in particular were more significantly influenced by sleep deprivation on emotion recognition (I suppose evolutionarily it seems to make sense). Some study limitations the authors humbly listed include not measuring chronotype (alertness and preference for activity early or late in the day) and motivation/interest level, and not verifying compliance of sleep time and duration (such as actigraph measurements).So for all the sleep deprived psychotherapists and the poker players who like to sit at the table all night, I hope this entry helps you to reconsider such unwise habits. Unless of course you share similar sentiments as the brilliant Lady GaGa: Mum mum mum mahMum mum mum mahCan't read my, Can't read myNo he can't read my poker face(Decided to randomly plug in the terrible lyrics to show how stupid they really are...god, I really need to get this horrid song out of my head...maybe it's time for me to sleep) (...nevermind)van der Helm E; Gujar N; Walker MP (2010). Sleep Deprivation Impairs the Accurate Recognition of Human Emotions SLEEP, 33 (3), 335-342Ekman P, & Friesen WV (1971). Constants across cultures in the face and emotion. Journal of personality and social psychology, 17 (2), 124-9 PMID: 5542557Steadman, L. (1980). : Kuru Sorcery: Disease and Danger in the New Guinea Highlands . Shirley Lindenbaum. American Anthropologist, 82 (3), 692-694 DOI: 10.1525/aa.1980.82.3.02a01130... Read more »
van der Helm E; Gujar N; Walker MP. (2010) Sleep Deprivation Impairs the Accurate Recognition of Human Emotions. SLEEP, 33(3), 335-342. info:/
Ekman P, & Friesen WV. (1971) Constants across cultures in the face and emotion. Journal of personality and social psychology, 17(2), 124-9. PMID: 5542557
Steadman, L. (1980) : Kuru Sorcery: Disease and Danger in the New Guinea Highlands . Shirley Lindenbaum. American Anthropologist, 82(3), 692-694. DOI: 10.1525/aa.1980.82.3.02a01130
- March 8, 2010
- 10:12 PM
- 36 views
The hidden global CO2 emissions of consumerism
by Phil Camill in Global Change: Intersection of Nature and Culture
It’s been easy for citizens of the developed, industrialized world to criticize China and India over their rapidly growing greenhouse gas emissions. This was one of the major reasons why the Kyoto Protocol was never ratified in the United States.
As many have pointed out, however, there are several flaws with this argument:
The per-capita C emissions [...]... Read more »
Steven J. Davis and Ken Caldeira. (2010) Consumption-based accounting of CO2 emissions . PNAS. info:/10.1073/pnas.0906974107
- March 8, 2010
- 08:04 PM
- 32 views
Sour Grapes
by Roberta Kwok in Journal Watch Online
Consumers place little value on 'eco-labeled' wines
... Read more »
Delmas, M.A., & L.E. Grant. (2010) Eco-labeling strategies and price-premium: The wind industry paradox. Business . info:/10.1177/0007650310362254
- March 8, 2010
- 05:20 PM
- 48 views
People who are more anxious go to church more often and are less anxious (or something...)
Are religious people more, or less, anxious? The problem's not as simple as it sounds. In general, religion is supposed to make people less anxious. But, partly for this reason, the people who turn to religion are more anxious to start with. What's more, all religions may not be the same, and different aspects of religion might have different effects.It's a surprisingly under-researched topic, but a couple of new papers have looked into it. The one in this post is from Northern Ireland and I'll cover the other one - from the good ole US of A - in the next post.The political landscape in Northern Ireland is marked by a sharp sectarian divide between Protestants and Catholics. What Chris Lewis and colleagues found was that female Catholics were the most anxious, and that they also went to Church the most often. Counter-intuitively, they also showed that going to Church was most strongly linked to less anxiety in... Catholic women! Read on...The study looks at data from the 2001 Health and Well Being Survey. Unusually for these kinds of surveys, it included the 12-item General Health Questionnaire, which is the gold-standard measure of anxiety. This survey found that people in Northern Ireland tend to report more anxiety than do people living in the rest of the UK (here's a detailed report, if you're interested).Lewis & co split the survey group into four: male and female; Protestant and Catholic.They found that men had lower anxiety scores than women, and Protestants had lower anxiety scores than Catholics. These effects were additive: male Protestants were the least anxious, and female Catholics the most anxious. The average differences were small (about 1.5 on a 36-point scale), but statistically significant.Churchgoing habits matched this pattern exactly. Male protestants went to Church least often (every few months, on average), and female Catholics the most often (every fortnight, on average).So then they looked at the correlation within these groups. What they found was that was that, within each group, people who went to church more often were less anxious. Male Protestant churchgoers were less anxious than male Protestant non-churchgoers, and female Catholic churchgoers were less anxious than female Catholic non-churchgoers (although still more anxious than male Protestant non-churchgoers).Now, the effect was pretty tiny. But what was interesting was that the strength of the effect followed the same pattern as for anxiety and churchgoing across the four groups.In other words, going to church had the biggest effect on reducing anxiety among female Catholics, and the smallest effect among male Protestants.What to make of all this?The simplest explanation is that being female and/or Catholic in Northern Ireland is a risk factor for anxiety. As a result, many Catholic women turn to the Church, and those that do have their anxiety levels reduced.Lewis, C., Shevlin, M., Francis, L., & Quigley, C. (2010). The Association Between Church Attendance and Psychological Health in Northern Ireland: A National Representative Survey Among Adults Allowing for Sex Differences and Denominational Difference Journal of Religion and Health DOI: 10.1007/s10943-010-9321-3 This article by Tom Rees was first published on Epiphenom. It is licensed under Creative Commons.
... Read more »
Lewis, C., Shevlin, M., Francis, L., & Quigley, C. (2010) The Association Between Church Attendance and Psychological Health in Northern Ireland: A National Representative Survey Among Adults Allowing for Sex Differences and Denominational Difference. Journal of Religion and Health. DOI: 10.1007/s10943-010-9321-3
- March 8, 2010
- 06:20 AM
- 69 views
Child pornography and English language learning
by Kimie Takahashi in Language on the Move
“Child pornography and English language learning”?! Could there be a connection?! Difficult to believe but true – I’m referring to a best selling English phrase book for Japanese high school students, Moetan: English phrase book.
Moetan’s storyline involves a smart high school girl, Inku, who has a crush on her classmate, Nao, an underachiever. To [...]... Read more »
Ingrid Piller . (2010) At the intersection of gender, language and transnationalism. In Nikolas Coupland. Ed. . Handbook of Language and Globalisation. Malden, MA: Blackwell. . info:/
- March 8, 2010
- 05:30 AM
- 44 views
Convicts and soldiers to be force fed Omega 3s?
by Yoni Freedhoff in Weighty Matters
As usual there are lots of news stories about Omega 3s (including last week's that some omega 3 supplements may contain high levels of PCBs) but two really caught my eye.The first detailed a hypothetical plan to force feed convicts omega 3 supplements as a means to reduce violent and aggressive episodes. That plan is being born out of the results of a recent study titled, "Effects of nutritional supplements on aggression, rule-breaking, and psychopathology among young adult prisoners".The study tracked 221 adult prisoners and randomized them to receive either placebo or a nutritional supplement containing 25 vitamins and minerals along with omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids. Staff then tracked aggressive and rule breaking behaviours.The authors found that the supplemented group saw their aggressive and rule breaking behaviours decrease by 34% versus a 14% increase in the control group.Sounds really impressive until you see the absolute numbers whereby we're talking about 11 incidents per 1,000 prison days in the supplemented group vs. 9.7 incidents per 1,000 prison days in the control. I also have to question the blinding in this study in that fish oil capsules are absolutely noticeable, even enteric coated ones, when you burp. Oh, and no, this wasn't truly an omega 3 study given the supplements had many other vitamins and minerals in them.So colour me unimpressed.The second story I mentioned? Apparently the American Department of Defense is considering force feeding the US military omega-3 supplements as a means to, "enhance stress resilience, wellness, and military performance".Now I'm not sure on which study they're basing their recommendations but hope if they do use them on the military that it doesn't hinder their troops' combat skills by rendering those fighting men and women less violent and aggressive.Zaalberg, A., Nijman, H., Bulten, E., Stroosma, L., & van der Staak, C. (2009). Effects of nutritional supplements on aggression, rule-breaking, and psychopathology among young adult prisoners Aggressive Behavior DOI: 10.1002/ab.20335
... Read more »
Zaalberg, A., Nijman, H., Bulten, E., Stroosma, L., & van der Staak, C. (2009) Effects of nutritional supplements on aggression, rule-breaking, and psychopathology among young adult prisoners. Aggressive Behavior. DOI: 10.1002/ab.20335
topics
join us!
Do you write about peer-reviewed research in your blog? Use ResearchBlogging.org to make it easy for your readers — and others from around the world — to find your serious posts about academic research.
If you don't have a blog, you can still use our site to learn about fascinating developments in cutting-edge research from around the world.
