Social Science posts

March 22, 2010
10:29 AM
785 views

Counselling, Conflict, Men and Abortion

Coyle et al. (2009) discuss how the lack of appropriate preabortion counselling, and conflict over the decision-making process, can lead to distinct psychological symptoms in women, and in men.

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Coyle, C., Coleman, P., & Rue, V. (2009) Inadequate Preabortion Counseling and Decision Conflict as Predictors of Subsequent Relationship Difficulties and Psychological Stress in Men and Women. Traumatology, 16(1), 16-30. DOI: 10.1177/1534765609347550

March 21, 2010
02:21 PM
911 views

Accepting chronic pain

by Adiemusfree in Healthskills: Skills for Healthy Living

How willing are you to have persistent pain? Can you accept pain without fighting against it? If you were told your pain was going to be there forever, would you avoid important activities or would you start to get back into life again?
Recently I reviewed about 200 questionnaires completed by people attending the [...]... Read more »

Fish, R., McGuire, B., Hogan, M., Morrison, T., & Stewart, I. (2010) Validation of the Chronic Pain Acceptance Questionnaire (CPAQ) in an Internet sample and development and preliminary validation of the CPAQ-8. Pain. DOI: 10.1016/j.pain.2009.12.016

March 20, 2010
08:01 PM
928 views

Did world religions help bring about complex societies?

by Tom Rees in Epiphenom

This is a long post, but hang on in there because it's worth it. There's a wonderful paper just out in Science that sheds new light on a mystery of human behaviour: why do people sometimes do good deeds even when they gain nothing from it.Some forms of altruism can be easily explained by evolution, but evolution can't explain why people are sometimes generous to completely anonymous strangers. This new study may have found a solution: it isn't something inherent to our nature, but rather something that we learn to do.You might have seen something of it already - it's featured on several newswires. I'm not going to go into detail on the headline results, because you can find them elsewhere (Wired magazine has a nice write up, for example).What interests me most about this study is the link they found religion. But first, here's a quick overview of what they did, and the major finding. The heart of the study was a standard battery of economic games designed to test their subject's understanding of fairness:In the 'Dictator Game' Player 1 is given a fixed pool of money (equal to 1 day's wages), and can share as much (or as little) as she likes with Player 2. In the 'Ultimatum Game', Player 2 is given the chance to reject offers that she feels are insultingly small.In the 'Third Party Punishment Game' a third player is given some money as well, and she can spend some of it to punish Player 1, if she thinks that the offer to Player 2 is too small.Now, the logical thing to do in all these games is to hold on to all your money. You have nothing to gain by sharing (the games are anonymous), and all that happens is that you go home with less. However, what usually happens is that people do share some money (usually not 50%, however!).What makes this new study unique is that they've put together data from the world over, including the rather marvellous Hadza (you can see the locations on the map). Then they compared how much people contributed with what kind of society they lived in.They found that contributions were smallest in societies that did not have a market economy (e.g. hunter gatherers). And they found that punishment was lowest in societies formed of small groups.This potentially resolves the conundrum! What it suggests is that anonymous altruism is not part of our evolutionary make up, but instead is something that we learn from the society around us. The reason big, complex societies can exist is that we drum it into our kids that they must be fair and kind to strangers (against their natural instincts).So what's the connection with religion?Well, they also showed that, in two out of the three games, the anonymous contributions were higher in those groups that had converted from tribal religions (in which gods do not enforce morality) to follow a 'world religion' (in practice, either Christianity or Islam).On the face of it, this is supports the idea that 'world religion' is a cultural adaptation to allow the formation of complex societies. The invention of all-seeing, morally concerned god increases the honesty in anonymous transactions, and thus allowing large, integrated communities to develop.When you look at the history of religions, it's clear that the development of religious ideas has progressed in tandem with the increasing complexity of society. Robert Wright has written a book on the idea, and in the supplementary material they give a nice summary of the parallels.It all sounds very plausible. However, it's not quite that simple, for a whole host of reasons.First is the problem that a 'world religion' may be a cause, not a consequence, of a complex society. A world religion is essentially one that's popular over large geographic area. However, the exchange of ideas that always goes together with the exchange of goods will inevitably bring about a convergence of beliefs to create a 'world religion'.So you would expect a complex, diverse society to develop some kind of syncretic belief system - a 'World Religion'. And that belief system would inevitably encapsulate the social norms of the complex society that created it. People create a god in their image.Suppose, for example, that countries with more parasites end up with more fractured societies that are naturally less trusting of strangers. After all, strangers could bring with them disease. Surprisingly, studies have found that this is exactly the pattern you see - people living in high parasite regions are less open to strangers and have more fractured religions (Fincher & Thornhill, 2008). These societies, with their tribal rather than world religions, would naturally be less co-operative in anonymous games.Perhaps moralising gods moralising gods are not required for complex societies. After all, the Romans and Greeks managed created large, complex societies despite having a pantheon of gods who were not exactly paragons of virtue.And the reality is that, in modern societies at least, non-belief is correlated with less corruption and more trust. Social norms, rather than god beliefs, seem to be of primary importance.As support for the hypothesis that 'world religions' promote pro-social behaviour, they quote the work of Shariff & Norenzayan. That was a small study which found that, in a similar economic game, subliminal religious primes (i.e. a quick flash of a religious word) were marginally more effective in believers than non-believers.However, they also showed that non-religious primes were equally effective, and also that without the priming both religious and non-religious were equally pro-social. What's more, other studies (Randolph-Seng & Nielsen, 2007, Ahmed 2009) have shown that pro-social effects of religion are all about the situation, rather than the beliefs.Put these findings together, and what you get is the strong suggestion that the way to encourage pro-social behaviour is to remind people about their cultural training (religious or otherwise). The more you reinforce a social norm of co-operation, the more people will co-operate.Now, that doesn't rule out a role of religion in stabilising societies. In fact, I'm inclined to that that there must be a link. But it is fearsomely difficult to prove, and it's clear that whatever the link is, it's much more complicated than it appears at first sight.I'm going to leave you with one other niggling anomaly from the paper. Remember that 'world religion' was associated with more pro-social behaviour in only two out of the three games? Maybe you were wondering which was the one out?Well, the game that was the 'Third Party Punishment' game. This is the game in which Player 1 should give more money if they fear that Player 3 might spend some cash to punish offers that were too low. It's a particularly relevant test because third party intervention to enforce the rules is a crucial feature of complex society.Unlike the other two games, being Christian or Muslim had no effect on Player 1's offers. What makes this doubly fascinating is that this is the only game in which wealth and income affected Player 1's decisions.The authors suspect it might be that the introduction of a 'judge' reduces the intrinsic motivation. In other words, the offers players make depends on what they think the judge will approve of, rather than what they themselves is fair.However, I couldn't help but be reminded of another study that looked at punishment behaviour in a similar game. They examined a cross-section of relatively high income countries, and found high levels of co-operative punishment, and low-levels of anti-social punishment, in the least religious societies (Copenhagen and Melbourne).Conceivably, if you don't believe that there is a god on hand to enforce the rules, you might just be motivated to do it yourself!... Read more »

Henrich, J., Ensminger, J., McElreath, R., Barr, A., Barrett, C., Bolyanatz, A., Cardenas, J., Gurven, M., Gwako, E., Henrich, N.... (2010) Markets, Religion, Community Size, and the Evolution of Fairness and Punishment. Science, 327(5972), 1480-1484. DOI: 10.1126/science.1182238

March 20, 2010
03:00 PM
734 views

Absinthe Fact and Fiction

by Neuroskeptic in Neuroskeptic

Absinthe is a spirit. It's very strong, and very green. But is it something more?I used to think so, until I came across this paper taking a skeptical look at the history and science of the drink, Padosch et al's Absinthism a fictitious 19th century syndrome with present impactAbsinthe is prepared by crushing and dissolving the herb wormwood in unflavoured neutral alcohol and then distilling the result; other herbs and spices are added later for taste and colour.It became extremely popular in the late 19th century, especially in France, but it developed a reputation as a dangerous and hallucinogenic drug. Overuse was said to cause insanity, "absinthism", much worse than regular alcoholism. Eventually, absinthe was banned in the USA and most but not all European countries.Much of the concern over absinthe came from animal experiments. Wormwood oil was found to cause hyperactivity and seizures in cats and rodents, whereas normal alcohol just made them drunk. But, Padosch et al explain, the relevance of these experiments to drinkers is unclear, because they involved high doses of pure wormwood extract, whereas absinthe is much more dilute. The fact that authors at the time used the word absinthe to refer to both the drink and the pure extract added to the confusion.It's now known that wormwood, or at least some varieties of it, contains thujone, which can indeed cause seizures, and death, due to being a GABA antagonist. Until a few years ago it was thought that old-style absinthe might have contained up to 260 mg of thujone per litre, a substantial dose.But that was based on the assumption that all of the thujone in the wormwood ended up in the drink prepared from it. Chemical analysis of actual absinthe has repeatedly found that it contains no more than about 6 mg/L thujone. The alcohol in absinthe would kill you long before you drank enough to get any other effects. As the saying goes, "the dose makes the poison", something that is easily forgotten.As Padosch et al point out, it's possible that there are other undiscovered psychoactive compounds in absinthe, or that long-term exposure to low doses of thujone does cause "absinthism". But there is no evidence for that so far. Rather, they say, absinthism was just chronic alcoholism, and absinthe was no more or less dangerous than any other spirit.I'm not sure why, but drinks seem to attract more than their fair share of urban myths. Amongst many others I've heard that the flakes of gold in Goldschläger cause cuts which let alcohol into your blood faster; Aftershock crystallizes in your stomach, so if you drink water the morning afterwards, you get drunk again; and that the little worm you get at the bottom of some tequilas apparently contains especially concentrated alcohol, or hallucinogens, or even cocaine maybe.Slightly more serious is the theory that drinking different kinds of drinks instead of sticking to just one gets you drunk faster, or gives you a worse hangover, or something, especially if you do it in a certain order. Almost everyone I know believes this, although in my drinking experience it's not true, but I'm not sure that it's completely bogus, as I have heard somewhat plausible explanations i.e. drinking spirits alongside beer leads to a concentration of alcohol in your stomach that's optimal for absorption into the bloodstream... maybe.Link: Not specifically related to this but The Poison Review is an excellent blog I've recently discovered all about poisons, toxins, drugs, and such fun stuff.Padosch SA, Lachenmeier DW, & Kröner LU (2006). Absinthism: a fictitious 19th century syndrome with present impact. Substance abuse treatment, prevention, and policy, 1 (1) PMID: 16722551... Read more »

Padosch SA, Lachenmeier DW, & Kröner LU. (2006) Absinthism: a fictitious 19th century syndrome with present impact. Substance abuse treatment, prevention, and policy, 1(1), 14. PMID: 16722551

March 20, 2010
07:38 AM
853 views

Does Child Sexual Abuse Cause Homosexuality?

by Ultimo167 in Strong Silent Types

Wilson and Widom (2009) add to the literature on links between having been a child abuse survivor and sexual orientation in adulthood. For a variety of possible reasons, they demonstrate that a 'tentative' link does exist between childhood sexual abuse and homosexuality, but only for men.... Read more »

Wilson, H., & Widom, C. (2009) Does Physical Abuse, Sexual Abuse, or Neglect in Childhood Increase the Likelihood of Same-sex Sexual Relationships and Cohabitation? A Prospective 30-year Follow-up. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 39(1), 63-74. DOI: 10.1007/s10508-008-9449-3

March 20, 2010
01:06 AM
508 views

Men Suffer for Too Much Small Talk

by Ultimo167 in Strong Silent Types

Mehl et al. (2010) have started to tease out the possibility that deeper, more thoughtful conversations lead to greater happiness. I can't help thinking what this might mean for men, since most of us were raised on the masculine ideal that bland small-talk is the only way to go.... Read more »

Mehl, M., Vazire, S., Holleran, S., & Clark, C. (2010) Eavesdropping on Happiness: Well-Being Is Related to Having Less Small Talk and More Substantive Conversations. Psychological Science. DOI: 10.1177/0956797610362675

March 18, 2010
10:02 PM
483 views

The Eco-Elite

by Journal Watch Online in Journal Watch Online

Consumers may choose green products to boost social status

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Griskevicius, V., Tybur, J., & B. Van den Bergh. (2010) Going green to be seen: Status, reputation, and conspicuous conservation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 98(3), 392-404. DOI: 10.1037/a0017346

March 18, 2010
05:05 PM
673 views

Parkinsonian emotion recognition impairment better accounted for by sleep deprivation

by William Lu in The Quantum Lobe Chronicles

The New York Times recently covered a paper by Grey and Tickle-Degnen, published in the journal Neuropsychology, finding that people with Parkinson's Disease (PD) are not able to recognize facial and vocal emotions very well. The article states that it's not clear why this seems to be the case. I briefly reviewed the original meta-analytic paper (the pdf can be found here) and saw that the research team accounted for 1) the emotion recognition tasks used, 2) the medication the participants were on, and 3) the existence of depression as possible moderatoring variables for the impairment in emotion recognition. They suggest that "the likely cause of this deficit is pathology in neural circuits involved in emotion recognition, particularly within basal ganglia structures including the ventral striatum and STN." This tentative speculation is just fine and dandy, but it doesn't really provide an explanation for why people with PD have this particular deficit in the first place. They rule out comorbid depression and visualspatial impairment, but go on to postulate that Lewy bodies disease, an abnormal amount of protein found inside the nerve cells of many PD patients, may be affecting their visual cortex, therefore affecting their emotion recognition abilities. Too bad there's no shred of evidence found in the research literature to support this hypothesis (they make sure to note this). What I found surprising what that they made no mention of sleep disturbances' possible moderating role in explaining their findings. Drawing from my previous entry on sleep deprivation's deleterious affects on emotion recognition, maybe it's the fact that people suffering from PD commonly have concomitant sleep problems, therefore leading to their emotion recognition impairment. Numerous studies have shown that PD significantly affects rapid eye movement sleep behavior leading to a variety of cognitive impairments (Massicotte-Marquez et al., 2009, Norlinah et al., 2009, Seugnet et al., 2009,). We now also know that REM sleep is crucial in the processing of emotional memory (Nishida, 2008). And like I said before, sleep deprivation takes a heavy toll on emotion recognition functioning (van der Helm, Gujar, & Walker, 2010). Sleep seems to account for much of our emotional life! In light of the aformentioned studies, it makes the most sense that sleep deprivation would be the more likely pathway to emotional recognition impairment in people with PD; not working memory dysfunction as the authors suggest. There may be many potential sources for interpersonal difficulties in PD individuals who are unable to read emotions accurately. Perhaps future sleep treatment can help prevent such difficulties from ever occurring. Just a thought... Gray HM, & Tickle-Degnen L (2010). A meta-analysis of performance on emotion recognition tasks in Parkinson's disease. Neuropsychology, 24 (2), 176-91 PMID: 20230112Massicotte-Marquez J, Décary A, Gagnon JF, Vendette M, Mathieu A, Postuma RB, Carrier J, & Montplaisir J (2008). Executive dysfunction and memory impairment in idiopathic REM sleep behavior disorder. Neurology, 70 (15), 1250-7 PMID: 18216303Seugnet L, Galvin JE, Suzuki Y, Gottschalk L, & Shaw PJ (2009). Persistent short-term memory defects following sleep deprivation in a drosophila model of Parkinson disease. Sleep, 32 (8), 984-92 PMID: 19725249Norlinah, M., Afidah, K., Noradina, A., Shamsul, A., Hamidon, B., Sahathevan, R., & Raymond, A. (2009). Sleep disturbances in Malaysian patients with Parkinson's disease using polysomnography and PDSS Parkinsonism & Related Disorders, 15 (9), 670-674 DOI: 10.1016/j.parkreldis.2009.02.012... Read more »

Gray HM, & Tickle-Degnen L. (2010) A meta-analysis of performance on emotion recognition tasks in Parkinson's disease. Neuropsychology, 24(2), 176-91. PMID: 20230112

Massicotte-Marquez J, Décary A, Gagnon JF, Vendette M, Mathieu A, Postuma RB, Carrier J, & Montplaisir J. (2008) Executive dysfunction and memory impairment in idiopathic REM sleep behavior disorder. Neurology, 70(15), 1250-7. PMID: 18216303

Seugnet L, Galvin JE, Suzuki Y, Gottschalk L, & Shaw PJ. (2009) Persistent short-term memory defects following sleep deprivation in a drosophila model of Parkinson disease. Sleep, 32(8), 984-92. PMID: 19725249

Norlinah, M., Afidah, K., Noradina, A., Shamsul, A., Hamidon, B., Sahathevan, R., & Raymond, A. (2009) Sleep disturbances in Malaysian patients with Parkinson's disease using polysomnography and PDSS. Parkinsonism , 15(9), 670-674. DOI: 10.1016/j.parkreldis.2009.02.012

March 18, 2010
04:25 PM
746 views

Death by human stampede

by Tom Rees in Epiphenom

Over the past 30 years, stampedes have killed at least 7,000 people and injured another 14,000. That's the conclusion that Edbert Hsu (Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions) and colleagues reached after a painstaking trawl of news reports in the world's English-language media.The real toll is probably even higher, of course, but the data were enough to allow Hsu to work out the characteristics of the most lethal stampedes. They found reports on 215 stampedes, of which 49 occurred at sporting events, 25 at musical events, 38 were political and 41 were religious. The rest (totalling 60) were due to a mixed bag of causes and were mostly spontaneous.And the award for the most lethal type of stampede goes to... religious ones! In simple terms of the number of fatalities per stampede, religious events come out over double that of their closest rival.The simple comparison is not a very fair, however. Religious stampedes take place in different parts of the world (often in the Middle East, which is the most dangerous place to be in a stampede), often in low income nations (also very dangerous), and often outdoors (slightly more dangerous than indoor stampedes).But even when you take all this into account, religious stampedes still come out on top of the lethality stakes - but sporting stampedes are so close as to make it a photo finish.There's one other factor that contributes to the lethality of a stampede, and that's the size of the crowd. Unfortunately, Hsu was only able to determine the size of the crowd in 130 cases.But even taking into account crowd size, religious stampedes are still pretty dangerous. When you look at fatality rate (i.e. deaths per crowd member), they're 6 times riskier than stampedes at sporting events.But with with crowd size taken into account, religious stampedes drop into third place. The riskiest kind of stampede by a long way are the spontaneous ones (because of the lack of crowd control), followed by political ones.The explanation for all this is fairly simple. Religion is the one event that brings together truly massive crowds, often in settings that are poorly controlled.One of the most lethal stampedes in recent history occurred in Iraq in 2005, when nearly 1000 people died when fears of a suicide attack sparked panic. In the same year, over 250 died (out of a crowd of 400,000) when Hindu worshippers set fire to shops.But the biggest contributor is the annual Hajj, which these days draws crowds in excess of 2 million. Five of the biggest stampedes in the past100 years occurred in Mina Valley, Saudi Arabia, during the Hajj.Over the past 3 decades, nearly 3,000 people have been killed in stampedes during the Hajj - the last big disaster being in 2006. With crowds that big, I suppose the surprise is that there are so few casualties!Hsieh, Y., Ngai, K., Burkle, F., & Hsu, E. (2009). Epidemiological Characteristics of Human Stampedes Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness, 3 (4), 217-223 DOI: 10.1097/DMP.0b013e3181c5b4ba This article by Tom Rees was first published on Epiphenom. It is licensed under Creative Commons.

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Hsieh, Y., Ngai, K., Burkle, F., & Hsu, E. (2009) Epidemiological Characteristics of Human Stampedes. Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness, 3(4), 217-223. DOI: 10.1097/DMP.0b013e3181c5b4ba

March 18, 2010
11:19 AM
898 views

When population booms in poor nations

by Dave in The Daily Monthly

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, population isn’t growing evenly across the world. While some areas are growing quickly, other places are stagnating. In nearly every case, population growth is slowest in rich countries and faster in poor countries. These two maps from the UN Population Division perhaps show the trend most dramatically:

As you can [...]... Read more »

Nikos Alexandratos. (2005) Countries with Rapid Population Growth and Resource Constraints: Issues of Food, Agriculture, and Development. Population and Development Review, 31(2), 237-258. info:other/

March 17, 2010
10:52 AM
596 views

Same-Sex Attraction Does Not Increase Suicide Risk...

by Ultimo167 in Strong Silent Types

A slightly convoluted but ultimately worthwhile study by Zhao et al. (2010), in which they both challenge the proposition that same-sex attraction leads to greater suicide risk, as well as plead with us all to stop thinking of GLB (their term) and its numerous alternatives, as one enormous homogenised blob. Their word of choice is 'oversimplify' (p.105).
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Zhao, Y., Montoro, R., Igartua, K., & Thombs, B. (2010) Suicidal Ideation and Attempt Among Adolescents Reporting “Unsure” Sexual Identity or Heterosexual Identity Plus Same-Sex Attraction or Behavior: Forgotten Groups?. Journal of the American Academy of Child , 49(2), 104-113. DOI: 10.1097/00004583-201002000-00004

March 17, 2010
04:47 AM
1,020 views

Entre « effets de petit monde » et émiettement communautaire: la légitimation culturelle à l’heure de Facebook

by ---a in Bodyspacesociety.eu

par Antonio A. CASILLI (Centre Edgar-Morin, EHESS) [1]
Le texte qui suit a été présenté aux Journées d’études Les réseaux sociaux: Quoi de neuf ?, qui ont eu lieu à l’université de Toulouse II-Le Mirail, 16-17 mars 2010, dans le cadre des activités du Réseau Thématique 26 de l’Association Française de Sociologie.
La communication (ici en [...]... Read more »

Antonio A. Casilli . (2010) Légitimation intersubjective de la présence en ligne et formation de réseaux sociaux : Une approche ethno-computationnelle. II Journées d'études du RT 26 (Réseaux sociaux) de l'Association Française de Sociologie "Les réseaux sociaux: quoi de neuf ?", 16-17 mars, Université de Toulouse II - Le Mirail. info:/

March 16, 2010
08:08 PM
560 views

Mad Neanderthals, peer review and scholarly publication

by Julien Riel-Salvatore in A Very Remote Period Indeed

There's been a growing rumble in the world of scientific publishing for the past several months, focusing especially on the nature and practices of the journal Medical Hypotheses. Briefly put, MH is a non-peer-reviewed journal that publishes original, controversial and thought-provoking ideas ("hypotheses" defined in the broadest possible sense, I guess you could say) about the medical realm sensu lato. Now, as reported by Science Insider, MH's editor, Bruce Charlton (here's his blog presenting his position on this affair), has all but been been fired as lead editor of the journal (unless MH is completely reorganized), mainly as a result of the brouhaha and subsequent fall-out over MH having accepted to publish a paper denying the link between HIV and AIDS. Indeed, some have gone so far as to wonder whether MH might be labeled "the most hated journal in science."Orac provides a thoughtful dissection of some of the problems with MH and of the impact of publishing some of what was published in that venue in recent years. I doubt I could do much better than that in terms of providing background and context to the 'regime change' underway at MH. That said, I figured I'd throw out my two cents about this, given two things: 1) I've recently published something in MH; 2) what it means for the public understanding of scientific arguments; and 3) Elsevier's role in all this.First, two years ago, a short commentary of mine was published in MH (Riel-Salvatore 2008), I hasten to add in response to a paper they had published, which I felt was very poorly argued and completely unsupported by the available data (Underdown 2008). To MH's credit, the process of publishing my reply was very smooth, transparent and, importantly, very quick. My comment was based on a post I first had up on AVRPI, a process I chronicled in detail before, and it took all of three months from the blog-to-published-comment process to unfold, which I was personally quite happy about. Likewise, I have to say that my impression throughout this process was that MH was quite open to even very 'vigorous' criticism of papers it published. It was also nice that you didn't have to pay to publish a comment, whereas you have to pay 'page fees' to publish an actual paper in MH (itself a questionable practice, especially if it doesn't result in open access to the paper in question, but that's another post for another time).That said, there was a good reason why I felt the need to publish that comment, even though, as a non-peer reviewed piece on a non-peer reviewed piece, it was essentially a double net loss to my research productivity, especially since I had no personal stake in this, i.e, it didn't portray any of my own work negatively. That reason was the amount of play the original paper had received in the popular press. And this, fundamentally, is the issue I have with journals like MH. To the public at large, reading that a 'study' or a 'new paper' has been published in a 'journal' (especially if it is by someone described as a professor or researcher affiliated with a bona fide university), implies that it is a serious contribution to the literature on given debates. In this case, the 'mad Neanderthal' meme as a credible explanation for their disappearance went full-steam ahead, with no real detractors on the record. I suspect that this acceptance was due in no small part to the fact that it had been published in a 'journal', never mind the facts that authors basically need to pay to have their research published in MH, with no resulting public access, and the that, contrarily to most research on Neanderthals that makes its way to the popular press, this paper was not critically evaluated by peers of the author. This is not to say that non-peer reviewed publications don't have their own raison d'être, but rather that they need to be explicitly recognized as such, especially before results published in such sources get fed to the media.As it is, to the non-specialist, MH certainly has the appearance of a peer-reviewed journal. For one thing, it's a 'journal.' For another, it's published by Elsevier, which touts itself as "the world’s leading publisher of science and health information" (from their website). With such backing, why wouldn't someone assume that MH is a reputable source? It's even got 'medical' right there in the title! Hell, I hadn't heard of MH before reading Underdown's paper, and my first reaction upon seeing it was an Elsevier pub certainly was that it was most likely a peer-reviewed journal. Plus, as this post's inclusion on Research Blogging shows, it even has a doi and everything, making the contents of MH appear as legitimate peer-reviewed publications, as does their inclusion in scientific databases like Web of Science. This is not to exculpate people who don't do their homework, but MH certainly has all the outside appearance of a peer-reviewed publication.This leads to the third point, namely the business practices of Elsevier, who bought MH in 2002 (the journal was created in 1975). I think an important question to ask is why Elsevier bothered to acquire MH in the first place? Given its current double-take on MH's worth as a scientific publication, it kind of makes one wonder whether the goal of dominating as much of the scientific publishing market as possible made the higher-ups at Elsevier ignore the nature of that journal in their continuing efforts to take over an increasing share of the publishing world, no matter what the costs... I very much doubt that they had as their ultimate goal to make MH into a full-blown peer-reviewed publication (if so, why wait 8 years?), so what's the story here? I think we may be witnessing an instance of Elsevier's business model backfiring, and though they're clearly trying to shift the fall-out solely on MH, I think it ultimately highlights the hypocrisy that grows from the tensions between the mission of scientific publication and the business realities faced by publishing conglomerates within which individuals become increasingly faceless entities conceived more as profit-making devices than conduits for the wide and timely dissemination of scientific knowledge. I think this is all the more grating given that scientists are essentially forced to give away their work to be published in the 'right' Elsevier journals - and those of other large publishing companies - (even if in many cases their reputation far precedes their incorporation by Elsevier) for purposes of getting tenure, professional prestige, etc.In any case, my point here is not to say that MH is all sorts of awesome and that Elsevier isn't. In fact, my only involvement with MH came as a reaction to a paper that I thought was of pretty low academic quality (which echoes some of the problems that precipitated the current fiasco) and which they nonetheless elected to publish, even though it echoed another short paper written almost 35 years prior (Wolbarsht 1975). It also isn't that it is not a peer-reviewed journal - even Nature publishes some non-peer reviewed comments that are downright wretched (see a nice takedown here)and which I'm sure the yahoos who write them bandy about as "publications in Nature!" (hey they have doi's and issue/page numbers and everything!). Rather, I think that this whole situation points to some systemic problems in academic publishing, especially as practiced by large conglomerates increasingly detached from the goals and individual realities of the given journals they ... Read more »

Riel-Salvatore J. (2008) Mad Neanderthal disease? Some comments on "A potential role for Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies in Neanderthal extinction". Medical hypotheses, 71(3), 473-4. PMID: 18524493

UNDERDOWN, S. (2008) A potential role for Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies in Neanderthal extinction. Medical Hypotheses, 71(1), 4-7. DOI: 10.1016/j.mehy.2007.12.014

March 16, 2010
06:44 AM
773 views

Warning: Global English may harm your mental health

by Ingrid Piller in Language on the Move

About ten years ago an overseas student from South Korea who was about to fail a unit I was teaching left a suicide note under my office door. She described herself as a “loser” who – in contrast to other overseas students – hadn’t got enough English to cope with her course. She wrote how [...]... Read more »

Song, J. (2010) Language ideology and identity in transnational space: globalization, migration, and bilingualism among Korean families in the USA. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 13(1), 23-42. DOI: 10.1080/13670050902748778

March 15, 2010
05:52 AM
656 views

How to Stop Smoking

by Neuroskeptic in Neuroskeptic

1. Don't smoke.2. See 1.This is essentially what Simon Chapman and Ross MacKenzie suggest in a provocative PloS Medicine paper, The Global Research Neglect of Unassisted Smoking Cessation: Causes and Consequences.Their point is deceptively simple: there is lots of research looking at drugs and other treatments to help people quit smoking tobacco, but little attention is paid to people who quit without any help, despite the fact that the majority (up to 75%) of quitters do just that. This is good news for the pharmaceutical industry and others who sell smoking-cessation aids, but it's not clear that it's good for public health.As they put it,despite the pharmaceutical industry’s efforts to promote pharmacologically mediated cessation and numerous clinical trials demonstrating the efficacy of pharmacotherapy, the most common method used by most people who have successfully topped smoking remains unassisted cessation ... Tobacco use, like other substance use, has become increasingly pathologised as a treatable condition as knowledge about the neurobiology, genetics, and pharmacology of addiction develops. Meanwhile, the massive decline in smoking that occurred before the advent of cessation treatment is often forgotten.Debates over drugs, or other treatments, tend to revolve around the question of whether they work: is this drug better than placebo for this disorder? Chapman and MacKenzie point out that even to frame an issue in these terms is to concede a lot to the medical or pathological approach, which may not be a good idea. Before asking, do the drugs work? We should ask, what have drugs got to do with this?Their argument is not that drugs never help people to quit; nor are they saying that tobacco isn't addictive, or that there is no neurobiology of addiction. Rather, they are saying that the biology is only one aspect of the story. The importance of drugs (and other stop-smoking aids like CBT), and the difficulty of quitting, is systematically exaggerated by the medical literature...Of the 662 papers [about "smoking cessation" published in 2007 or 2008], 511 were studies of cessation interventions. The other 118 were mainly studies of the prevalence of smoking cessation in whole or special populations. Of the intervention papers, 467 (91.4%) reported the effects of assisted cessation and 44 (8.6%) described the impact of unassisted cessation (Figure 1).... Of the papers describing cessation trends, correlates, and predictors in populations, only 13 (11%) contained any data on unassisted cessation.And although pharmaceutical industry funding of research plays a part in this, the fact that medical science tends to focus on treatments rather than on untreated individuals is unsurprising since this is fundamentally how science works:Most tobacco control research is undertaken by individuals trained in positivist scientific traditions. Hierarchies of evidence give experimental evidence more importance than observational evidence; meta-analyses of randomized controlled trials are given the most weight. Cessation studies that focus on discrete proximal variables such as specific cessation interventions provide ‘‘harder’’ causal evidence than those that focus on distal, complex, and interactive influences that coalesce across a smoker’s lifetime to end in cessation.Overall, it's an excellent paper and well worth a read in full (it's short and it's open access). Of course, it is itself only one side of the story and many in the tobacco control community will find it controversial. But I think Chapman and MacKenzie's is a point that needs to be made, and point applies to other areas of medicine, especially, although not exclusively, to mental health. This week, British social care charity Together told us thatSix out of ten of people have had at least one time in their life where they have found it difficult to cope mentally... stress (70%), anxiety (59%) and depression (55%) were the three most common difficulties encountered by the publicWhich was not still not quite as good as rivals Turning Point who last month saidThree quarters of people in the UK experience depression occasionally or regularly yet only a third seek helpThese were opinion surveys, not real peer-reviewed science, but they might as well have been: the best available science says that if you go and ask people, 50-70% of the population report suffering at least one diagnosable DSM-IV mental disorder in their lifetime, and that the majority receive no treatment at all. This leads to papers in major journals such as this one warning that "Depression Care in the United States" is "Too Little for Too Few."But we don't know whether these tens of millions of cases of untreated "mental illness" should be treated, because there is basically no research looking at what happens to such people without treatment. On the other hand, the very fact that they aren't treated, and yet manage to hold down jobs, relationships and so forth, suggests that the situation is not so bad.Of course we must never forget that depression and anxiety can be crippling diseases, but fortunately, such cases are at least comparatively rare. By using the word "depression" to cover everything from waking-up-at-4-am-in-a-suicidal-panic-melancholia to feeling-a-bit-miserable-because-something-bad-just-happened, it's easy to forget that while clinical depression is a serious matter, feeling a bit miserable is normal and resolves without any help 99% of the time. Even though there are no published scientific studies proving this, because it's not the kind of thing scientists study.Incidentally, this issue is a good reminder that there's no one big bad conspiracy behind everything. With smoking, Big Tobacco find themselves in direct opposition to Big Pharma, like in From Dusk Till Dawn when the psychopaths fight the vampires. With depression, the people who are quickest to decry the widespread use of antidepressants often seem to be the ones who are most keen on the idea that depression is common and under-treated, perhaps because it allows them to recommend their own favorite psychotherapy. Big Pharma hands the baton to Big Couch in the race to medicalize life.Chapman S, & MacKenzie R (2010). The global research neglect of unassisted smoking cessation: causes and consequences. PLoS medicine, 7 (2) PMID: 20161722... Read more »

Chapman S, & MacKenzie R. (2010) The global research neglect of unassisted smoking cessation: causes and consequences. PLoS medicine, 7(2). PMID: 20161722

March 14, 2010
11:50 PM
920 views

Science blogs and public engagement with science: practices, challenges, and talking out of your ass

by Isis the Scientist in On Becoming a Domestic and Laboratory Goddess...

This week a couple of my Sciblings have been abuzz about an article published in some journal I'd never heard of... a minor impact journal...the Journal of Who Gives a Fuck Science Communication. Bora has a great break down of some of the major criticisms. Drugmonkey, one of the subjects of the "analysis" in this article, is also displeased and critical of the author's conclusions.I've
since read the offending article and can only tell you this - I have no
idea what the balls the author is talking about. Seriously, this
article is about as informative as this: Video 1: A current favorite at the Isis house. When emailed this video, PhysioProf
replied, " Couldn't they afford to animate some fucking legs on those
fuckers?" I have always wondered why Mr. Lunt has no eyes.But, for those of you who are still interested, here's the run down...Inna Kouper,
a graduate student in Library and Information Science at Indiana
University, somehow magically chose 11 blogs to study, one of which was
Pharyngula. Now, I'm not hating on Pharyngula. PZ plays an important role in the blogosphere and, while I think that sometimes his commenters get out of control,
he's got a unique voice and an uncanny ability to rally the troops. No
one can deny that the climate at Pharyngula is not necessarily
reflective of the entire blogosphere. Still, the fact is that Inna
Krouper sampled 11 blogs. There are 80 blogs currently at
ScienceBlogs, 8 more at Discover Blogs, and a bazillion independent and
network blogs indexed by the Nature Network. Yet, somehow Inna chose
these 11 blogs as representative of the genre and one of them was
motherfucking Pharyngula. Then, she did this:A
combination of quantitative and qualitative techniques of content
analysis has been used in this study. The qualitative analysis
involved iterative close reading of posts and comments with the purpose
of identifying common types of statements and activities
conceptualized as modes of participation. This conceptualization was
informed by the speech act theory and the pragmatics perspective yet it
was purposefully left rather loose and open to allow for the categories
to emerge from the data. Each time a mode of participation was
identified, it was entered into a catalog, and then a post or a comment
was assigned a corresponding code. Along with the modes of
participation, the posts were coded for topics and sources of the post;
the comments were coded for the reader's identification elements (e.g.,
a nickname, first name, full name, link to blog, or blog author).
Subsequently all codes were counted and the analysis proceeded with the
examination of the most frequent and rare patterns and their groupings.Translation?Figure 1: Inna sat down one night, read some blogs, and then wrote some shit. She must really be itching to finish the ole thesis.I
mean, I truly am baffled by these methods, especially when the author
brags that "it is necessary to analyze current practices of science
blogging. To date no attempts have been made to do that. The present
study is the first step in this direction." This article is a step
alright...Figure 2: Problem is, none of realize where that step is taking us until it is too late to unlearn the stupid.I'm
just plain ole disappointed by the "methodology." This author could
have taken the opportunity to perform a carefully controlled study with
randomly-selected non-scientists. She could have shown them blinded
content and administered questionnaires. Instead she wrote 10 pages of
opinion and passed it off as science.After pages upon pages of presenting cherry-picked content, Inna concludes this:Science
blogs examined in this study are very heterogeneous. They provide
information and explain complicated matters, but their evaluations are
often trivial and they rarely provide extensive critique or articulate
positions on controversial issues... It appears that science blogging
can also be characterized as relying on reductive analysis and
dependent reporting and drawing caustic and petty commentary. These
characteristics may as well be applied to the newspaper and magazine
science communication, but with the newer science communication outlet
such as blogging they indicate that the potential of blogging to do
something differently, e.g., to provide informed expert and citizen
commentary, is not realized. In their current multiplicity of forms and
contents science blogs present a challenge rather than an opportunity
for public engagement with science. Lack of genre conventions, which
for the audience translates into broken expectations and uncertainty,
impedes the development of stable readership and participation from the
larger public, which may also be very heterogeneous. The "neighborhood
bar" or "water cooler" commentary creates a sense of community with
shared context and culture, but at the same time it creates a barrier
that prevents strangers and outsiders from joining the conversation. As
a community of scientists or individuals close to science, the
existing readers may enjoy the entertaining nature of science blogs and
not need science blogs to serve as a place for discussion and rational
debate. Relying on such community of readers, bloggers may reduce their
interpretive activities and resort to copying, re-distributing, and
re-packaging of the existing information, which is still quite
rewarding given the background of the majority of current readers and
yet requires much less time and effort. This study provides further
evidence that blogging as a web tool has no magic properties on its
own. Without a concerted effort of different social actors involved it
will not solve any problems...Reading this, I
realize that I did my PhD in the wrong damned field. I would be a much
more prolific publisher if I had entered a field where I could have
written whatever bullshit moved me on any given day and called it
"research." I also wonder how many of you feel like you
simply add "caustic and petty commentary"? I question how Inna can
conclude that blogs pose a barrier to the conversation. That's a
difficult statement to take seriously, knowing that Inna had no access
to traffic data for any of the blogs she read. For me, I know that a
single blog will be read by 1000s more non-scientists than any original
scientific article I publish in a peer-reviewed journal. And, she
certainly wouldn't have found the analysis trivial if she had read some
of Ed Yong or Carl Zimmer's work, not that I find any of the blogs she included trivial. Then again, I think it is the diversity of voice is what makes the blogosphere so beautiful. My
sample size = 1 is probably no better than Inna's sample size = 11, but
I can at least offer my experience to the data set. I get many letters
a week from young people interested in science careers and soliciting
advice on graduate school, fields of study, and professional
development. The number of people who have come to my office in person
to have these conversations is trivial in comparison. Thus, these data
would lead me to conclude that my blog presence has lowered the barrier
to engagement with this audience.I'll also never forget one of the occasions,
quite a while ago, that I wrote about some novel research. It was a
topic semi-related to my expertise.&nb... Read more »

Inna Kouper. (2010) Science blogs and public engagement with science: practices, challenges, and opportunities. Journal of Science Communication, 9(1). info:/

March 13, 2010
11:06 AM
805 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
826 views

Can going to church change your views of god?

by Tom Rees in Epiphenom

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
489 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

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